The Treasury Department announced on Wednesday that it sanctioned an illicit Iranian shipping empire run by Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, the son of a prominent Iranian government official. According to officials at the Treasury Department, the new sanctions — targeting more than 115 individuals, entities and shipping vessels — represent the largest Iran-related action since 2018.

“​​Our goal is to limit Tehran’s primary source of revenue, to pressure the regime to end its nuclear threat, curtail its ballistic missile program and stop its support for terrorist groups,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender told reporters on Wednesday. “The Trump administration seeks to drive down Iranian oil exports under President [Donald] Trump’s renewed max pressure campaign.”

Shamkhani is the son of Ali Shamkhani, a senior advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, who had supervised nuclear negotiations with the U.S. earlier this year. He controls a vast shipping network that stretches far beyond Iran, with ties to India, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Italy and Switzerland, among other nations based mostly in Europe and the Middle East, according to the Treasury Department. The network generates tens of billions of dollars in profit. 

Shamkhani and other Iranian oil traders often obscure their connections to Iran when overseas, and Treasury Department officials said the new sanctions will make it more difficult for them to conduct business abroad.

“What this action underscores is the extraordinary steps the Iranian regime is having to go through to execute oil sales,” a senior Treasury official said Wednesday. “Those that continue to go forward are going to be more complicated, making it harder for Iran to execute, and more importantly, likely resulting in them generating less revenue.”

Shamkhani’s network does not only transport Iranian oil. It also transports Russian oil, and last week he was sanctioned by the European Union for his role in the Russian oil trade.

“We fully are recognizing and going after this network because of the illicit activity that involves Russia and Iran,” the senior official said. A Bloomberg News investigation published last year detailed Shamkhani’s ties to both Moscow and Tehran. 

According to a Foundation for Defense of Democracies analysis, Iran exported 1.7 million barrels of oil per day in June, a higher figure than during the Biden administration. Iranian oil exports averaged 800,000 barrels per day at points in Trump’s first term, at the height of his maximum pressure sanctions campaign.