Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 17 /Trend T.Konyayeva, T.Jafarov/
Iran has been facing the international sanctions and pressure for a long time but the current restrictions are the severest ones ever, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said at the meeting with representatives of the Commerce Chamber on Monday, ISNA reported.
"Though Iran has been facing severe economic and political sanctions during the past 32 years, the current restrictive measures are a big problem for us," Salehi said. "We shall try to turn this problem into our advantages."
Iranian authorities repeatedly claimed that the international sanctions against the Islamic Republic are useless and not able to harm the Iranian economy and Iranian people.
Iran's refusal to abandon its nuclear activities has resulted in resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council in 2010, as well as additional unilateral sanctions approved by the U.S. Congress and the foreign ministers of all EU countries, which were primarily directed against the banking, financial and energy sectors of Iran.
Restrictions imposed by the EU include the ban on the sale of equipment, technologies and services to Iran's energy sector which is a major source of revenue for the Iranian regime; the same measure refers to the refining industry. New investments in Iran's energy sector have also been also prohibited as a whole.
Last week, David Cohen, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, announced that the Obama administration started consideration of sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran for allegedly backing an assassination plot in which two Iranian-born men are accused of planning to blow up the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington, Los-Angeles Times reported.
Such sanctions would aim to isolate the Central Bank from the world economic system by barring any firm that deals with it from doing business with U.S. financial institutions.