Press TV Ordered to Pay Over £330,000 to a British MP

A court in London has ordered Press TV, the news network owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran, to pay £338,000, equivalent to 1.4 billion tomans, for defaming a British MP. The ruling came after the English-language network aired a report in August 2016 accusing Nadhim Zahawi, a Kurdish member of the Conservative Party, of facilitating an oil deal between the Islamic State (ISIS) and Israel and European countries. The court ruling noted that the text of this report was removed from Press TV's English-language website last September, but it had been widely republished by other media before that. According to The Guardian and The Telegraph, Press TV did not defend itself against these accusations. This is not the first complaint against Press TV in the UK. Previously, in January 2012, Ofcom, the media regulator in the UK, revoked Press TV's license based on a complaint from Maziar Bahari, a journalist for Newsweek. The accusation against Press TV was the airing of a film featuring Bahari's 'confessions' in a program called 'Iran Today.' Mr. Bahari stated that these confessions were obtained under severe psychological pressure. For this reason, Ofcom fined Press TV £100,000 in 2011. In July 2012, the satellite service company Intelsat cut off the broadcasts of networks affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Intelsat, based in Luxembourg, stated in a letter to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting that it decided to cut off Iranian networks' broadcasts in line with U.S. sanctions against Ezzatollah Zarghami, the head of this organization. Press TV and the Spanish-language Hispan TV were among the networks whose broadcasts were cut off. Satellite broadcasts of this network resumed on March 6, 2014. In this context, senior media executives in Iran remain on the European sanctions list.