Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,982 appearances
18 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard yesterday
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The most efficient means of transporting huge quantities of oil was by ship.
And from the Persian Gulf, as we know, there's just one natural sea outlet, the Strait of Hormuz.
From the mid-20th century, the strait was busy with oil tankers.
Huge amounts of crude oil were being exported from the region and transported to foreign markets.
The Strait of Hormuz was, and is, one of the most important maritime routes for oil transportation.
Since the discovery of oil in Iran, the industry had been dominated by foreign companies, such as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, or AIOC.
But in 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill to nationalize the oil industry.
This was a result of years of increasing tension with other nations,
and the desire to take control of a profitable resource.
For context, the AIOC, a British company, was making profits of around 40 million pounds a year from Iranian oil, while Iran received just 7 million.
Within Iran, the decision to nationalize the oil industry was a popular one,
but other nations were concerned or even angered.
Some people in Britain saw the oil in Iran as British oil.
After all, the British were the ones who discovered it in the first place and then developed the industry.
Oil was one of their biggest overseas assets.
Iran's actions were seen as a betrayal, or even a kind of theft.
In retaliation, British warships were deployed to the port of Abadan, home to the AIOC's oil refinery.
Ships carrying Iranian oil were effectively blocked from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Abadan Crisis, as it came to be known, was one of the events that led to the 1953 coup d'etat.
The Prime Minister of Iran was overthrown during a coup that was orchestrated by British and US intelligence, MI6 and the CIA.
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