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Foreign petrochemical buyers owe $18B to Iran

Business Materials 21 April 2015 17:39 (UTC +04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21

By Fatih Karimov - Trend: Foreign buyers of Iranian petrochemicals owe $18 billion to the country.

Greek and Indian refiners have the highest amounts of debt to Iran, followed by Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and South Korean companies, Iran's Mehr news agency reported April 21.

Mohsen Ghamsari, director for international affairs at the National Iranian Oil Company, said that the country has about $4 billion in oil money unpaid by international oil refiners.

The oil debt is mainly related to Greek refiners and Shell, he said, adding that smaller amounts of unpaid oil money should be settled by Asian refiners.

Lifting the banking and financial sanctions will pave the way for paying the total debts, Ghamsari said.

Previously Iranian media outlets reported that the country's oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh has tasked a working group with collecting $2.3 billion debt from Royal Dutch Shell.

Shell lost money trading Iranian crude in 2012 shortly before a European Union embargo and still owes $2.3 billion to Tehran for oil purchases.

Edited by CN

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