The Alton group has denied having conducted any contract to export oil products from Syria, also claimed the decision of the European Union to imposed sanctions on the Board of Directors that it is allegedly for "supporting the government to secure funding through the provision of exporting oil through the Oil Marketing Office ", expressing surprise of sanctions imposed by a respected side, such as the EU, as the sanctions are not based on any legal justification against the Board of Directors and the secretary Salim Alton and Joseph Kelsah in the company, calling on the EU to review its sanctions that hurt the all the people of Syria.
The group said in a statement that we had publish in full: The Alton Group has learned about this through the media on the first hand when it was reviewing the Official Journal of the European Union number 126/4 Date 15/05/2012
the decision to impose sanctions on the Group Alton Group Co., it’s Chairman Saleem Alton and the secretary of the company Joseph Kelsah. These sanctions include freezing their assets and banning them from traveling to the European Union.
It was stated in the decision that "we support the government with funding through the by exporting oil through our oil marketing office, which was earlier was included by the sanctions imposed by the European Union"
Based on the above our company wants to clarify the following:
1. The sanctions are not based no any legal justification, as we have not made any contract nor have we, in any way, exported any Syrian oil to any party; if it was done this is easy to prove through bank transfers or the movement of tankers or relevant documents, and thus the sanctions decision needs to be based on some type of contract; and we did not understand how this can be done with acontract that has noever exestedin the first place; Moreover, the company has never dealt with any type of oil or its byproducts.
2. our companies work in trading food, equipment and contracting, and it employs hundreds of workers from different Syrian governorates and from all spectrums of the Syrian society, and the sanctions will harm our staff and negatively affect our ability to secure the basic foodstuff of the Syrian ordinary citizens, they will also affect us financially and harm our moral, without us doing any economic activity that justify any sanctions, we are a company working according to economic domestic and international laws.
3. We have a good understanding of Europe and the European laws and we have been working for decades with the European Union without any problems and we are sure that the draft resolution has been prepared on the illegal and non-objective reasons that are incompatible with the European values and the principles of human rights, we do not believe that the respected European institutions are satisfied with such abuses that are not based on any legal or moral grounds.
4. Based on the above we call on the EU to review its sanctions that affected the all the Syrian people; as we reserve our legal right to take legal actions against all sides that caused us this injustice.