Strategic Assessment
In the course of the World Bank’s annual conference in 2006, a spokesperson for the Board of Governors of Commerzbank, one of the largest banks in Germany, declared that his bank had no intention of limiting its activities with Iran. The Board’s spokesperson explained emphatically that the suspicions regarding Iran and the nuclear question were unfounded, and that therefore the bank saw no reason to sever its commercial ties with longstanding partners. US treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., who was the intended audience of those remarks, chose not to confront the bank’s representatives during the conference itself. Instead, he dispatched his under secretary Stuart Levey to a series of visits at the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt. Some months after Levey’s last visit there, Commerzbank announced the severing of most of its contacts with Iranian firms.