Iranian commission advances Hormuz “service fees” as weekly transits fall to 73

IRNA reported that on Sunday the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission approved Article 3 of the “Strategic Action Plan to Ensure the Security and Development of the Strait of Hormuz,” an article held over from a previous session. Commission spokesman Hassan Ghashghavi told reporters that “under Article 3, fees will be charged for services including maritime, environmental, fuel supply in special conditions, insurance, safety, and other services provided in the Strait of Hormuz,” with ships from countries Iran permits to transit required to pay. The measure remains at committee stage and requires full parliamentary approval; it is not law. Tehran’s insistence on the word “services” rather than tolls is deliberate: transit passage rights do not permit charging for passage itself, but do permit charging for services rendered.

The traffic the bill would monetise is thinning. Lloyd’s List Intelligence recorded 73 transits of the strait between 10 and 16 August, down from 91 the previous week, with at least 22 vessels entering the Gulf and 21 departing. Its assessment: Iran’s “targeting of Hormuz users and Washington’s blockade of Iranian ports continue to suppress traffic volumes, although a small core group of operators remains active.” Kpler data cited by Al Jazeera on 20 August put the total at 236 ships of all types — oil, gas, dry cargo and chemical carriers — between 1 and 19 August, about 12 a day. Before the war began on 28 February, Al Jazeera notes, roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and LNG moved through the strait.

Assessment: A fee regime is a sovereignty claim dressed as a tariff schedule, and its value to Tehran is mostly that it forces every transiting flag state to decide whether paying constitutes recognition. Two cautions. First, reporting from March, citing Tasnim and Fars, described a Hormuz toll law already passed through a different committee; either there are two instruments in play or one account is wrong, and the widely repeated figure of $2m per vessel traces only to a low-quality aggregator. Do not treat it as established. Second, the revenue case is weak at twelve ships a day. The point is leverage over who sails, not the money.