20JUL

Baqaei calls the UAE missile claim baseless

2 min read

11:19UTC

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman called the Emirati missile allegation baseless on 19 August, telling Mehr News Agency that unfounded claims damage confidence between neighbours.

← Back to Hormuz premium inverts the German spark spread Jump to analysis ↓

EconomicDeveloping

Key takeaway

Iran denies the missile allegation but has announced no answer to the Emirati measure itself.

Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, rejected the Emirati missile allegation as baseless on 19 August. Unfounded claims against Iran damage efforts to prevent regional insecurity and build confidence between neighbours, he told Mehr News Agency ¹.

The allegation he is answering dates to 8 August, when the United Arab Emirates said an Iranian missile had targeted an ADNOC vessel in the strait . That claim, and the piracy accusation that followed it, form the stated grounds for the trade and financial halt Abu Dhabi announced on 18 August.

Baqaei disputed the grounds and left the measure alone. He announced no countermeasure, summoned nobody in Abu Dhabi, and named no Emirati official. His phrasing sat in the register of neighbourly confidence-building, which is not the register a government reaches for when it intends to answer in kind.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, said on 19 August that accusations linking Iran to a missile attack on a UAE-linked vessel are false. He argued that making such claims makes the region less safe, because they damage trust between neighbouring countries. This is Iran's direct answer to the UAE's decision, a day earlier, to name Iran's Revolutionary Guard as the attacker and cut off trade. The two governments now disagree publicly about who did what, with no independent verification available to settle it.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Baqaei's denial keeps Iran's public position that it bears no responsibility for the tanker attacks the UAE has cited as grounds for a full trade halt.

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from Iran

Iran

LeftRight

Primary parallel: Baqaei has denied Iranian responsibility for Hormuz-area disputes before; his 13 August comments on strait administration similarly rejected the premise that Iran bears the cost of the conflict's disruption, arguing instead that others owe Iran for environmental damage (ID:5683).

Counter-parallel: Iran's own account of the 11 August Vela Nova strike differs from this case: there, the US openly claimed the strike, leaving Iran nothing to deny. Denial is only available to Tehran when the underlying attack is attributed to it in the first place, which is why this rejection follows the UAE's naming of the IRGC rather than a US claim.

Consensus view: Iran's foreign ministry, through spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei, characterises the UAE's missile allegation as unfounded and argues that repeating it undermines confidence-building between neighbours, the same framing Baqaei used on 13 August when he tied any Hormuz administration deal to compensation for environmental damage he blames on the conflict rather than on Iran .

Counter-view: The UAE's own 13 August statement did not rest on this single incident; it formally named the IRGC as the perpetrator of an ADNOC tanker attack and invoked UN Security Council Resolution 2817 , a legal step Abu Dhabi does not appear to have reversed since.

Key tension: Whether a categorical denial from Tehran's spokesman carries weight against a formal, resolution-citing attribution from a state that has just cut all trade with Iran on the strength of it.

Sources:Mehr News Agency·Mehr News Agency

Mentions:Esmaeil Baqaei →Iran →Mehr News Agency →Tehran →Emirates →Abu Dhabi →ADNOC →M/V Vela Nova →United Arab Emirates (UAE) →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs →

First Reported In

Update #172 · The strait nobody can count, insure or pay

Mehr News Agency· 19 Aug 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Abu Dhabi cuts Iran's payment channel

Baqaei's rejection answers the missile allegation underlying the UAE's trade halt.

Occurred 17 Aug 2026

Read story →

This Event

Baqaei calls the UAE missile claim baseless

Tehran contests the reason Abu Dhabi gave, not the measure Abu Dhabi took.

Different Perspectives

Cross-border power traders

The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.

EDF

River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.

Gasunie

TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.

German gas-fired generators

Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.

European Commission (DG Energy)

Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.

Spain's LNG terminal operators

Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.