The Toll Booth

Iran built a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz before asking the world to recognize it.

geopolitics

On Qeshm Island, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel verify vessel details and assess the passage fee. They have been doing this since March 13. Twenty-six transits completed. The fee runs approximately two million dollars per ship. Payment: Chinese yuan, routed through CIPS, or cryptocurrency. No SWIFT. No record visible to the international sanctions architecture.

The ships that pay cannot be named. To name them publicly is to acknowledge the toll, which triggers secondary sanctions under US law. So the ships that pay borrow other ships’ identities. Lloyd’s List has identified three: LNG Jamal, a Japan-origin vessel dismantled at an Indian demolition yard in October 2025; Baltic Highway, dismantled in India in 2020; Nabiin, a Liberian-flagged aframax, dismantled in Bangladesh in 2021. Each of these ships no longer exists. Their AIS identities re-emerged in the strait in March 2026, attached to vessels carrying live cargo and paying live tolls. The ship that transits under LNG Jamal’s name is not LNG Jamal. LNG Jamal is scrap metal in India. What passes through Qeshm is a ghost borrowing a dead ship’s papers.

On the other side of the silence, Iran cannot publicly acknowledge the toll mechanism at the international level. To do so would be to confirm the sovereignty claim explicitly, which every naval power on the planet rejects. So Iran’s deputy parliament speaker, Hamidreza Hajibabaei, confirmed the Central Bank deposit to Iranian media — domestically, with parliamentary authority — while the diplomatic channel maintained strategic silence on the specific mechanism. First revenues deposited. Up to twenty million dollars per day in potential tanker tolls. The payment has no public existence in the transaction record. The commercial silence is engineered from both ends.

The Sanmar Herald did not pay. The Indian-flagged very large crude carrier had been granted clearance to transit by Iran’s ambassador to India, who gave India’s maritime authorities a guarantee: no toll levied on Indian ships. On April 18, IRGC gunboats opened fire on the Sanmar Herald anyway. The radio operator’s words — heard in The Object — were: “You gave me clearance to go… You are firing now! Let me turn back!” The ambassador had no authority over IRGC Navy operational command. The clearance was real. The gunboats were also real. This is how the toll booth enforces its fee: not through a gate, but through the demonstration of what happens to a ship that was told there would be no gate.

The recognition demand in Iran’s formal counter-proposal — “international recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz as Iran’s natural and legal right” — arrived after the revenues did. Hajibabaei confirmed Central Bank receipt on April 23. The formal diplomatic demand appeared in the counter-proposal days later. The sequence matters: the toll was operational before any sovereignty claim was made. The IRGC operationalized control; the civilian track then sought recognition. The demand is a receipt request, not a bid.

Iran’s parliament is now legislating what the IRGC established in March. The National Security and Foreign Policy Committee advanced the “Strait of Hormuz Management Plan” on March 31, with over 250 parliamentary signatures. Four stated legal objectives: ensuring shipping security, charging environmental polluters, collecting fees for guidance services, establishing a regional development fund. Ships disobeying the rules face seizure; non-compliant vessels may lose twenty percent of their cargo value. The full parliament vote and Guardian Council review remain pending. What was IRGC practice in March is Iranian codified law in the making.

The counterargument runs like this: piracy has always been priced in. The East India Companies operated in waters riddled with it. The Russian shadow fleet, the North Korean AIS-spoofing networks — commerce found its way through. The Hormuz toll is expensive, but commerce adapts. The question is price, not principle.

The counterargument is not wrong about history. It is wrong about what Iran is doing. Piracy operates below state acknowledgment. States denounce it publicly while trade routes reroute privately. What Iran has done is different in kind: a deputy parliament speaker confirmed revenues to Iranian media. A parliamentary committee advanced codification with 250 signatures. A formal diplomatic counter-proposal named the sovereignty demand explicitly. Iran is not hiding the toll below state level — it is legislating it above state level. The question has moved. It is no longer what price operators pay to transit a dangerous strait. It is whether the Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty percent of global oil has flowed under the doctrine of innocent passage, survives the conversion from international commons to regulated Iranian jurisdiction. That is not a question commerce can price in. That is a question of what law governs the world’s most consequential waterway, and who gets to answer it.

Sources

- Solen