TEHRAN – Ali Akbar Velayati, head of the Expediency Council Center for Strategic Research, said on Thursday that Tehran won’t allow the U.S. to rob $2 billion of Iranian funds.

“The Islamic Republic has shown it will never waive its rights… and the Iranian people won’t allow the international theft to take effect.”

The remark comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on April 20 that almost $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets must be turned over to American families of people killed in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and other attacks blamed on Iran.

Tehran has strongly objected to the ruling, threatening to take the case to international arbitration.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had said, “It is a theft. Huge theft. It is highway robbery. And believe you me, we will get it back.”

Also, Zarif penned a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, where Zarif impressed on him that “the United States has devised a pseudo-legal scheme that subjects Iranian assets held in U.S. and foreign banks, and even Iranian cultural property held on loan by American museums, to spurious rulings and unlawful collection proceedings.”

SOURCE:   http://tehrantimes.com/news/301018/Tehran-won-t-let-2b-international-theft-takes-effect-Velayati