Tehran, Iran, May 8
Trend:
Member of Iranian Parliament's energy committee Jalal Mirzaei has spoken on several subjects, including the "grey market" in Iran and the fuel prices.
"The black market has a negative connotation, while the grey market gives opportunity to monitor the current situation in Iran and the imposed sanctions as well," he told Trend.
"The expression adds up to the ambiguity and we need to constantly monitor the Americans in the current situation and continue our work in ambiguous atmosphere,", he added.
Referring to the possible dual rates for fuel in the country, despite the parliament opposing it, he said that at the moment, the plans to introduce dual rates have stalled.
"We should wait and see how the situation turns out," he said, but said that the decision in this case would be purely on economic basis.
Speaking about the smuggling of fuel from Iran, he said the statistics on this aren't precise.
"Recently there have been reports about 11 million liters of gasoline being out per day while the volume is increasing to 20 million liters," he said.
Responding to whether the smuggling is done by poor people living at Iran's boarder areas, he said that the government has authorized cooperative markets near borders to control the fuel smuggling.
"Currently the price of fuel that is being sold by cooperatives is high and close to prices in target markets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey," the official said.
"We can not say its smuggling but the drastic difference in price would create motivation for smuggling and the security solutions aren't working," he added.
"If we want to control smuggling we should think of other solutions by considering the country's social situation and political situation in the region alongside livelihood of people," Mirzaei noted.