Is Israel still buying Iran's oil?

When I landed in New Brunswick it was because I was being hounded half to death by the government for back taxes. Stemmed from a little disagreement over the difference between "income" and "capital gains". Their point of view prevailed, I filed for bankruptcy, and suddenly I was a maritimer.

When you're new to Saint John one of the coolest things you notice is those huge super-tankers. They make their way up the Bay of Fundy from the middle east and disgorge their cargo at Canada's biggest oil refinery, right there on the outskirts of Saint John.

Oddly enough, at the very time I showed up in Saint John as a displaced tax refugee there was a landmark case in the papers between Irving Oil and the federal tax department. Seems that somewhere along the route that those supertankers took, the cargo was sold to an Irving affiliate in Bermuda and then resold to Irving Oil. The result - the profits were made in tax-free Bermuda!

The case dragged on for years, and eventually the tax evaders with their dozens of lawyers and consultants and lobbyists won. The largest oil refinery in Canada is actually a non-profit.

Which brings me to the Iran oil boycott.

A couple of years ago Richard Silverstein had an article in the Guardian about how Israel buys Iranian oil, in spite of the fact that even then the Israelis were ostensibly boycotting all things Iranian. Apparently Iranian crude is ideal for Israel's refineries for technical reasons.

There's a simple solution. You buy your oil from a middle-man like Glencore in Switzerland. You're not buying your oil from Iran, you're buying it from a Swiss commodity trader. Hands are clean all round. After all, the Swiss aren't boycotting Iran, and neither is Glencore. Beautiful!

With a typical barrel of oil changing hands at least fifteen times between the wellhead and the consumer, nobody really knows where any oil comes from at the end of the day. So this Iran oil boycott that's making big news these days is nothing more and nothing less than political grandstanding.

So are the refineries in Haifa and Ashdod still processing Iranian crude?