Baku, Azerbaijan, August 20
Trend:
The Central Bank of Iran has officially removed the US dollar from the Sana system (electronic monitoring system to control transactions), replacing it with the Chinese yuan.
In a statement on Monday, the CBI announced that it has removed the US dollar from trade activities, Tasnim news agency reported August 20.
It added that exchange offices will no longer sell the US dollar through the Sana system and will instead sell yuan.
The decision came after the Iranian government on August 7 unveiled a much-awaited package of policies to help strengthen its national currency – the rial – which has lost nearly half of its value against the US dollar since the start of the year.
The package, which was unveiled by the Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Abdolnasser Hemmati during a live televised interview, most importantly comprised mechanisms to control the US dollar rates through a recently launched “secondary currency market.”
Accordingly, the CBI would no longer be involved in determining the dollar exchange rates – what critics argued had only resulted in producing “unrealistic rates” for the US dollar.
Instead, the exchange rate would be pegged to the actual trading figures as obtained from transactions between suppliers and buyers in the secondary foreign currency market, Hemmati said.