>URANIUM ONE SCANDAL TIES?
In 2009 Goldman acquired its uranium trading arm, called NUFCOR International Ltd, as part of a wider deal to buy the London-based trading desk of Constellation Energy.
NUFCOR International's roots stretch back to 1968, when a group of private South African gold companies established the Nuclear Fuels Corporation of South Africa (NUFCOR SA) to market most of the country's uranium, which was produced as a byproduct of their gold mining.
In the 1970s, the Shah of Iran arranged a deal with NUFCOR to supply his country with low-grade uranium for his planned nuclear energy program.
Professor Hecht found in NUFCOR's archives the exact details of the sale for the first time.
In 1975, NUFCOR signed an agreement to supply Iran with 2,400 metric tonnes of yellowcake, Hecht says. Over the following years, NUFCOR shipped 775 metric tonnes of the fuel to Iran, before the Islamic Revolution in 1979 put the deal on hold.
NUFCOR discussed a second deal with Iran in 1984 to supply 1,485 metric tonnes of yellowcake, but the deal was eventually blocked by the apartheid-era South African government in 1986.
Nine years later - because the South African government wanted to settle the affair - the uranium that had not been delivered to Iran was sold to a New York trading company and a German electricity firm and the money was returned to Tehran.
Iran revealed its purchase of yellowcake to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1990s. While the IAEA has said Iran's yellowcake stockpile came from South Africa, it has never publicly revealed the company behind the sale.
"This is the main, or possibly the only, material being used in Iran's enrichment plants," the World Nuclear Association says of the yellowcake delivered from South Africa to Iran.
Olli Heinonen, a former U.N. nuclear inspector who is now a Senior Fellow at Harvard University, said in an email Iran may have obtained additional yellowcake from other, unknown sources. It has also mined a small amount of raw uranium.
https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-is-quietly-backing-out-of-the-yellowcake-uranium-business-2014-2