The Man Who Built the Rival Exchange
Chris Cook, the Petrodollar, and a Century of Oil and Power
Published May 22, 2026
To understand what Iran is doing in the Strait of Hormuz today — charging tolls in yuan and stablecoins, building a permanent architecture of control over one fifth of the world's seaborne oil — you have to go back more than a century. The story begins not in Tehran or Washington, but in London, where British interests first reached into Persian soil and extracted something that would reshape the global economy for generations.
In 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded following the discovery of a large oil field in Masjed Soleiman. The British government owned 51% of the company. For decades, profit flowed overwhelmingly into European hands. The company reneged on agreements to train Iranian engineers, paid Iranian workers considerably less than foreigners, and housed them in substandard conditions. When Iran received revenue at all, much of it went to repay debts owed to European creditors incurred by earlier rulers. The oil beneath Iranian soil was, in every practical sense, a British asset.
When Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 — returning Iranian oil to the Iranian people — Britain and the United States responded by orchestrating a coup in 1953 that removed him from power and reinstated the Shah. The nationalized industry was restructured into a London-incorporated consortium in which British Petroleum held 40%, Royal Dutch Shell held 14%, and American oil majors including Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of California, and Texaco each held 8% stakes. The oil came back under Western control. Mosaddegh spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
This history is not ancient grievance. It is the foundation on which every subsequent confrontation between Iran and the Western financial order has been built.
The petrodollar system that governs global oil pricing today was itself an engineered arrangement. After the United States abandoned the Bretton Woods gold standard in 1971, Washington struck deals with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to price oil in dollars and recycle surplus petrodollars into U.S. assets. The effect was structural and profound: every country in the world that needed oil needed dollars first. This created permanent global demand for American currency regardless of U.S. economic performance, and allowed the United States to run persistent trade deficits without the currency collapse that would have destroyed any other nation doing the same. The petrodollar was not simply a pricing convention. It was the financial architecture of American imperial power.
The first serious challenge came from Saddam Hussein. In 2000, Iraq formally switched its oil sales from dollars to euros under the UN Oil-for-Food program. The UN warned it would cost Iraq at least $270 million annually in lower interest earnings and force buyers to pay less per barrel to offset conversion costs. Saddam proceeded anyway, calling the dollar the currency of his enemy state, and converted approximately $10 billion of Iraqi reserves into euros. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and removed his regime. Since the fall of Iraq, every subsequent Iraqi administration has traded crude oil exclusively in dollars. That fact receives almost no attention in mainstream accounts of the war.
Libya followed a similar trajectory. Muammar Gaddafi announced plans for a pan-African, gold-backed currency — the gold dinar — that would have allowed African nations to price oil outside both the dollar and the euro. Libya was destabilized. Gaddafi was killed during the NATO intervention of 2011. The gold dinar was never minted.
The pattern is observable in the historical record without recourse to conspiracy: leaders who moved to price oil in non-dollar currencies faced invasion, destabilization, or regime change. The petrodollar system has been defended, with lethal consistency, every time it has been seriously challenged.
Which makes what happened next all the more remarkable.
Chris Cook was not an Iranian revolutionary or an anti-American ideologue. He was the former director of the International Petroleum Exchange — London's own oil trading exchange, the institution at the heart of Western energy pricing. From that vantage point he spent years watching how intermediaries manipulated the oil market, making it more volatile than necessary while profiting at both the producer's and the consumer's expense. Frustrated by what he had seen from the inside, Cook wrote directly to the governor of the Central Bank of Iran in the late 1990s, proposing the creation of a Middle Eastern oil exchange with its own benchmark price — outside the existing Western pricing structure.
The Iranians were interested. The Saudis initially were not, citing their ties to the United States. After September 11, 2001, the Saudis withdrew their objections. In May 2004, Cook and his Iranian partner Mehdi Moslehi presented the Wimpole Consortium proposal to the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran. The contract to design and build the Iranian Oil Bourse was awarded to the Wimpole Consortium. The man who had run London's oil exchange was now building Iran's.
The internal resistance Cook encountered was revealing. The Iranian Oil Ministry did not want transparency in the oil market — the existing opaque system, for all its dysfunction, was generating enormous profits for the Iranian elite. Cook pushed forward anyway. There was also a widely reported assumption that the bourse would price oil in euros, fitting neatly into the petrodollar war narrative that had attached itself to Iraq. Cook himself said the euro was not practicable and was never the point. The point was an alternative pricing mechanism — a benchmark that did not originate in New York or London.
The Iranian Oil Bourse opened its first phase on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf on February 17, 2008, trading petroleum, petrochemicals, and gas in non-dollar currencies. It was designed as a free trade zone open to any company, domestic or foreign, that met its listing criteria. By 2009 it was operating primarily as a spot market for petrochemical products, with plans for sharia-compliant crude oil futures in a second phase. It achieved some traction — Iran's oil exports increasingly settled outside dollars in the years following its launch — but liquidity constraints limited broader adoption, and the tightening of U.S. sanctions after 2012 prevented it from reaching its potential as a genuine global alternative.
What the bourse could not achieve through market mechanisms, Iran is now attempting to achieve through leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. The toll system announced this week — $1 per barrel for oil tankers, payment required in yuan or stablecoins, administered in partnership with Oman — is structurally different from what Saddam or Gaddafi attempted. Rather than simply switching the currency of Iran's own oil sales, Iran is imposing non-dollar payment requirements on all traffic through an international chokepoint it has demonstrated the military capacity to control. Every tanker captain who pays in yuan to transit the strait is participating, whether he intends to or not, in the slow erosion of the petrodollar's global reach.
China understands this clearly. The yuan payment requirement advances Beijing's long-standing goal of internationalizing its currency in energy markets without China needing to fire a single shot or sign a single treaty. Russia, which has been pricing more of its own oil in yuan since 2022, has an obvious interest in seeing the system take hold. The BRICS nations have spent years discussing alternative payment mechanisms for energy trade. Iran, from its position of military leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, is now making those discussions concrete.
The United States finds itself in a position its architects of the petrodollar system never anticipated: unable to prevent a direct challenge to dollar dominance in energy markets because the challenge is being mounted from a chokepoint it cannot easily shut down without shutting down the global economy along with it. The naval blockade of Iranian ports has not reopened the strait. Negotiations have not produced a deal. And every week the toll system operates, it becomes more normalized — more simply the way things work.
A British man who ran London's oil exchange and grew disgusted with its manipulation helped build the infrastructure that made this moment possible. He was trying to create transparency and fairness in a market he knew was rigged. He may have helped build something considerably larger. The man who knew best how the Western oil pricing system worked decided to help construct its rival.
History has a way of proceeding without asking permission.
Note: Historical data on the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Mosaddegh nationalization are from public record. Chris Cook's account of the Iranian Oil Bourse is drawn from his 2006 interview with Resilience.org and a 2022 interview with Low Impact. Iraqi oil euro-denomination details are from the UN Office of the Iraq Programme, November 2000. Strait of Hormuz toll details are from Bloomberg reporting, May 21, 2026.