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Iran shifts oil sales away from dollar
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 14:19:28

Hojjatollah Ghanimifard

Deputy head of the National Iranian Oil Company for international affairs says Iran has completely dropped dollar in its oil sales.

“We issue invoices in dollars and agree with clients that the letters of credit and other means of payment will have a non-dollar basis,” he said.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Hojjatollah Ghanimifard said that over the past three months, Iran has received 75 percent of the proceeds from its oil sales in euros and the remaining 25 percent in the Japanese currency, yen.

Analysts are of the view that Iran's oil revenues have enabled the country to bear the costs of UN sanctions and US attempts to prevent dollar transactions through third party banks.

Ali Shams-Ardakani, head of the energy committee of Iran's Chamber of Commerce, said the move away from the dollar was “absolutely right” and was economically justifiable on the grounds that it helped prevent losses due to the fall in the value of the US currency. “It should have happened much earlier,” FT quoted him as saying.

Ghanimifard did not deny there have been some problems for Iran in opening letters of credit but did not elaborate on the extent of the problem or which banks were involved.

“Sanctions could not harm our exports and those banks that have problems issuing letters of credit for our clients are the ones that lose income,” he said, insisting that trying different channels did not cost Iran “even one single cent”.

“We understood that money does not exist only in the west,” Ghanimifard said.

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