Latest updates: family embracing new reality after being reunited with Zaghari-Ratcliffe in the early hours of this morning
- Foreign Office urged Richard Ratcliffe not to make ‘song and dance’
- Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returns to the UK after six-year ordeal
- Debt, sanctions and a cold tent: how the hostages were freed
In his backgrounder on the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, my colleague Patrick Wintour says that the £400m owed by the UK to Iran was paid through the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement (SHTA), a channel set up in 2020 by the Trump administration to let humanitarian trade to flow into the heavily-sanctioned country.
In a thread on Twitter starting below, Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, head of the Bourse and Bazaar Foundation, an economic diplomacy thinktank, explains in more detail what SHTA is, and how it provided a solution to the problem of how to repay the debt without breaking international sanctions.
There were many times when we thought it was happening, mostly last year when we knew a deal had been reached. And at the last minute, Britain pulled out. And that’s when we were preparing for her arrival, we were having a celebration party and then she didn’t turn up. So this time we were cautious.
But when she heard Mummy was coming home, she thought her father was joking. She said to her dad: ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ and she reconfirmed with me when she saw me yesterday, and said: ‘Is it true that Mommy’s really coming home?’ And my heart just broke because this little girl has been promised her mother would come home.
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