Lloyd's List confirmed on 7 May that vessels have paid up to $2 million per ship to obtain Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) transit clearance, with payments settled in Chinese yuan1. Iran has not published a tariff schedule, and the PGSA registration channel that opened on 6 May still shows zero formal sign-ups from the 2,000-vessel stranded fleet. The toll route is operating in parallel without a public registry: vessels pay quietly, then transit.
The architecture matters more than the figure. OFAC, the US sanctions enforcement office, runs almost entirely on the dollar. A SWIFT message routed through a US correspondent bank trips a screening obligation under executive orders 13902 and 13224, the legal spine of the 1 May Sanctions Bulletin (SB0483) issued alongside General Licence W. The screening fires automatically; the bank has to act or face penalties. A yuan-denominated payment routes around all of it, with no SWIFT trail through New York, no US correspondent bank on the chain, and no automatic OFAC tripwire.
The legal foundation Iran is invoking is the Majlis Hormuz sovereignty law ratified on 2 May and the PGSA structure created on 5 May. Together they convert a maritime chokepoint into a domestic-law toll booth, and the yuan denomination is the architectural choice that lets Iran's PGSA collect outside the dollar system.
The template is a 2022 import. Russian crude buyers settled in yuan through Chinese correspondent banks after the 2022 SWIFT exclusions, exactly to escape the dollar-clearing leg that OFAC sanctions hook into. Iran has now extended that template from commodity sales to maritime access fees, the first known instance of a sanctioned state using yuan-denominated transit revenue at scale. SB0483 was a warning framing rather than a new prohibition; the vessels paying in yuan face secondary-sanctions risk under existing executive orders, but enforcement against a yuan transaction with no US nexus requires OFAC to designate the specific vessel or shipper rather than rely on the automatic correspondent-bank step. That is a measurably slower, more political enforcement path.
A signed MOU would unwind the PGSA collection inside a month. That ties the precedent's durability to the 9 May reply window: every day the toll collects in yuan is a day the dollar enforcement architecture falls one notch shorter, and a day the yuan-routing template hardens into a usable model for the next sanctioned state to copy.
