For much of the last 15 years, the United States has denied licenses to export aircraft to Iran and/or sanctioned Iranian aviation due to links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), though informal sanctions existed for decades before that. Against this backdrop, Mahan Air, Iran’s largest airline with more than 70 aircraft, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps enterprise and a source of transportation and cargo services for the Qods Force and proxy groups such as Hezbollah, sought to profit by purchasing both U.S.-made passenger jets and European models using American engines.
Today, Mahan Air is the largest violator of U.S. sanctions on the Iranian civil aviation sector. Over the past four years, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the State Department have failed to prevent Mahan from circumventing the sanctions. This has enabled Mahan Air to purchase passenger aircraft not only for commercial use, but also to provide them to airlines in Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Syria. By leveraging the large budget of the IRGC Cooperative Foundation, Mahan Air has become an aviation empire in Iran. The company has used dozens of fake companies in Asia and Africa to purchase illegally nearly 20 Airbus A340 long-range and wide-body passenger aircraft in past decade.
Over the past four years, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the State Department have failed to prevent Mahan from circumventing the sanctions.
Most recently, this involved a front called Macka Invest in Gambia which, on February 29, 2024, purchased two A340s that it then transferred from the Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania to Iran. Shortly after, the director of the Civil Aviation Department of Lithuania, Vidmantas Plėta, explained that paperwork claimed the planes’ destination to be Clark International Airport in the Philippines, but they diverted to Tehran instead, one via Kabul. In Tehran, Mahan Air overhauled the aircraft, with one put into commercial service on June 10, 2024, officially revealing Mahan Air to be its buyer.
Many airlines have retired Airbus A340 long-range and wide-body aircraft in recent years due to their high operational and maintenance costs, as they have four engines. While Airbus is a European company, the Franco-American aircraft engine manufacturer, CFM International is part of the consortium providing engines for most of their variants. Despite their high fuel consumption, government subsidies on aviation fuel and operations shield Mahan Air from financial losses.
Today, Mahan Air operates 13 Airbus A340s in four different variants, flying both domestically and to other cities in the Middle East and the Far East. Additionally, Mahan Air has transferred five other A340s to Syrian Air and Conviasa, Syria and Venezuela’s respective flag carriers. Absent any intervention by the U.S. government to counter Iranian evasion tactics, as airlines try to offload Airbus A340s, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Mahan Air will likely try to repeat such evasion.
