Oman has rejected an Iranian proposal to jointly charge fees on ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, according to a single-sourced, unconfirmed report. The claim contradicts Iran's Revolutionary Guard, which said last week a fee-sharing deal was already in place, and lands inside a still-unsettled framework for running the waterway under the US-Iran memorandum.
Oman has quietly rejected an Iranian proposal for the two countries to jointly charge fees on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, according to a New York Post report citing an unnamed high-ranking regional official. Muscat declined to accept fees even on a voluntary basis for environmental and security services, the report says.
IRGC statement gets ahead of the talks
The reported rejection contradicts a claim made last week by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that a fee-sharing arrangement had already been agreed. According to the same report, the terms of any revenue-sharing deal had not been finalized even on Iran's side. A separate source indicated the IRGC's public statement got ahead of where the negotiations actually stood.
The report has since been repeated by other outlets, including Russian state-run agency TASS, without additional independent sourcing being added. The reporting chain runs back to a single unnamed official, so the story remains reported rather than confirmed. Independent confirmation from Reuters, AP, or an on-record Omani government statement has not yet emerged.
Oman softens, then pulls back
Oman's position on fees has shifted in tone rather than substance in recent months. Its foreign minister, Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi, has previously drawn a distinction between mandatory tolls, which Muscat opposes, and a voluntary-contribution model resembling the one used in the Strait of Malacca, where Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore invite shipping companies to fund navigation, environmental and search-and-rescue services without a compulsory charge. That earlier openness to a voluntary model makes the reported rejection notable, since it suggests Oman has retreated even from the softer version of a fee arrangement.
The fee dispute sits inside a broader and still-unsettled framework for managing the waterway carrying roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG trade. Under a memorandum of understanding signed between the United States and Iran last month, ships were guaranteed safe passage through Hormuz for sixty days, with the longer-term administration of the strait left to be worked out between Iran, Oman and other Gulf states.
Politically, Oman has reason to distance itself publicly from any Iran-linked toll scheme: President Donald Trump has twice threatened to bomb Oman if it agreed to what he described as de facto tolling of the strait, and Washington has separately signalled that any Iranian toll on Hormuz would be treated as a red line.
Source: Investinglive
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