According to a story appearing in London broadsheet The Daily Telegraph, the bill for the $500,000 ransom paid to Iran to enable release of imprisoned hiker Sarah Shourd was footed by Oman’s Sultan Qaboos. The question of who paid is interesting because U.S. sanctions would forbid U.S. persons from paying the ransom to the Iranian government.

State Department Philip Crowley, however, was somewhat cagey in his discussion of the ransom payment and U.S. sanctions during Wednesday’s daily press briefing:

QUESTION: Since you’ve gotten brought up to speed from the Omanis on the arrangements that were made but want to leave it to them to describe, can you at least assure us that U.S. sanctions weren’t violated in whatever the arrangements were?

MR. CROWLEY: I have nothing to suggest that there were any violations.

But in today’s press briefing Crowley side-stepped an effort to get him to confirm that Sultan Qaboos paid the ransom.

In the context of payment of ransoms to Somalia pirates, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) made clear that U.S. economic sanctions override any interest in protecting the safety and liberty of kidnapped Americans being held for ransom. This is not to say that OFAC might not license such payments, although if it did it certainly wouldn’t want that to be known. This might explain Crowley’s caginess about describing what happened. On the other hand, it is also possible that Sultan Qaboos made the payments but has his own reasons for not admitting that publicly.

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