Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson says talks with Oman are constructive and positive; "We did not address the issue of fees in the discussions with Oman regarding the Strait of Hormuz, but it is natural to collect fees for services received."

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson says talks with Oman are constructive and positive; "We did not address the issue of fees in the discussions with Oman regarding the Strait of Hormuz, but it is natural to collect fees for services received."

Rhetoric around charging for passage through the Strait of Hormuz has surfaced repeatedly in past periods of Iranian tension, and the established pattern is that the threat itself has never been carried through into an enforced toll regime, since doing so would cut against Iran's own crude exports, the bulk of which transit the same waterway. The transmission channel when such talk escalates is not the fee itself but the war-risk premium: freight rates, insurance costs for Gulf loadings, and front-month crude spreads, with prompt WTI and Brent historically bid on perceived disruption risk rather than on any actual change to physical flows. The immediate context is the Omani mediation channel, which has served as the standing back-channel between Tehran and Western counterparts, and framing the talks as constructive sits oddly alongside the fees remark, which reads as sovereign-rights signalling rather than a policy announcement. The distinction worth drawing is between transit fees, a legal grey zone under international maritime convention that Iran has raised before without acting on, and actual interference with tanker traffic, which is the only variant that has repriced the curve durably. What is worth watching is whether the fees language is repeated by officials above spokesperson level, any movement in Gulf tanker insurance quotes, and whether the Oman track produces anything concrete on the nuclear file, since the two threads have tended to run inversely.