BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar.8
Trend:
Approval of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) related bills could reduce costs of export transportation and create access to a wider market, said a spokesman of the Iranian Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters' Union.
"Iran is currently export between 500,000 to 600,000 tons of barrels of surplus oil products per day but the costs of transportation and money transfer have increased. We even have to sell our products cheaper than normal prices while it has growing risk and we are not able to work with the (global) banking system," said Seyed Hamid Hosseini, Trend reports citing ILNA.
"Iran has focused on neighbor markets during sanction and if sanctions are lifted export costs would be reduced between 10 to 20 percent and country's export revenue would increase to 20 percent. Lifting sanction would not have a major change in weight of export but it could accelerate the export status, reduce risk and expand export activities," he added.
Hosseini went on to note that FATF bills and sanctions are closely related, if there is an agreement for lifting sanctions then the issue of FATF related bills should defiantly be solved so we could use banking communication, SWIFT, and other global banking systems.
"On the other hand if sanctions are not lifted, approval of the FATF could not solely solve the country's main problem, it could only accelerate Iran's current relations with China and Russia. Approval of the FATF-related bills would resolve the global concerns over the support of terrorist group and money laundering and foreign sides would not be concern about money transfer from or to Iran," he stated.
Following the disapproval of the two related FATF bills, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has blacklisted Iran.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered the re-evaluation of FATF-related bills by the Expediency Council of Iran in December 2020.