Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct.19/ Trend G. Mehdi/
The Export Guarantee Fund of Iran (EGFI) will issue letters of guarantee for Iranian private sector oil exporters to support them against international sanctions; the Mehr News Agency quoted the EGFI managing director Kazem Doust-Hosseini as saying.
Special facilities will also be granted to the exporters, he added.
The fund has been furnished with 50 million Euros as the initial capital to support start up activity, Doust-Hosseini said.
On September 9, the Iranian private sector delivered the first shipment of crude oil to foreign buyers, despite the U.S. and EU sanctions targeting the Islamic Republic's oil sector. Non-Iranian tankers transported the oil.
The private sector has signed several contracts to sell crude oil overseas, Hassan Khosrojerdi, the chairman of the union of Iranian exporters of oil derivatives said.
An agreement has been made that allows an Iranian consortium comprising private firms to export 20 per cent of its oil exports to international markets, including the EU, he added.
"This equates to around 400,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil per day," he noted.
Economic experts say that Iran's private sector will fill the gap created by international sanctions on the country's oil sector and Central Bank.
On September 2, Mohammad-Ali Khatibi, who is Iran's OPEC governor and the director of the National Iranian Oil Company, said the country's oil exports are at their normal level and are unaffected by Western embargoes.
"We don't see anything abnormal, almost everything is progressing routinely," he told the ISNA news agency.
At the beginning of 2012, the United States and the European Union imposed new sanctions on Iran's oil and financial sectors with the goal of preventing other countries from purchasing Iranian oil and conducting transactions with the Central Bank of Iran.
U.S. sanctions came into force on June 28, whilst the EU bans on Iranian oil imports came into force on July 1.