The United States should have waited for Iran's new government to settle in before bringing into effect on July 1 the latest layer of sanctions aimed at Tehran's nuclear program, Iranian oil minister Rostam Ghasemi said Friday.
"We always seek to interact with the world. It was only fair that they [the US] had waited for the new government to take office...given that people stabilized the system with so many votes and the new president was elected with the slogan of interacting with the world," Ghasemi said in a speech broadcast on state television.
"Unfortunately, they imposed new sanctions. At least, they should have delayed them," he said.
It has been speculated that Ghasemi will leave the cabinet when President-Elect Hassan Rowhani takes office on August 3.
Rowhani, who won the presidential race with 50.7% of the vote on June 14, has vowed to settle the nuclear standoff between Iran and the West through negotiation and interaction.
Ghasemi said the new sanctions, which target Iran's rial, were aimed at neutralizing Tehran's efforts to cut its dependence on petrodollars through greater reliance on tax income and domestic production.
Iran's oil exports have dropped by more than half since EU sanctions took effect in July last year. The EU measures include not only an embargo on imports of Iranian oil into EU countries but also a ban on the provision of EU-linked insurance for shipments of Iranian oil. Iran's state-run economy is heavily dependent on petrodollars.
"They deprived us from international shipping insurances and banned refineries from using Iran's oil," Ghasemi said, referring to the EU sanctions.
He also referred to the pressure exerted by Washington on various countries to limit Iran's ability to move oil to its customers.
"They banned all ships to sail towards Iran. We were using the flags of different countries to sail in international waters but they forced those countries to stop that too." RIAL TARGET
Washington's latest move includes the imposition of sanctions on any foreign financial institutions that "knowingly conduct or facilitate significant transactions for the purchase or sale of the Iranian rial, or that maintain significant accounts outside Iran denominated in the Iranian rial."
The sanctions make vulnerable any foreign financial institutions that "knowingly conducted or facilitated any significant transaction related to the purchase or sale of Iranian rials or a derivative, swap, future, forward, or other similar contract whose value is based on the exchange rate of the Iranian rial" or a financial institution that has "maintained significant funds or accounts outside the territory of Iran denominated in the Iranian rial."
Nevertheless, Ghasemi said, despite "risks and sanctions pressures" Iran's energy development was advancing "strongly."
"The problems with oil transportation have been removed and today we have capability and possibility of exporting oil as much as before the sanctions with the ships we have access to," he said.
Iran's sales to its top customers in Asia were initially hard hit by the EU insurance ban. Japan, however, devised a government insurance framework to address the difficulty in obtaining cover while South Korean refiners accepted an offer from Iran to deliver crude on Iranian tankers. Much of India's intake of Iranian crude is also delivered on Iranian ships.
Ghasemi, who spoke at Friday Prayers in Tehran, said the various layers of sanctions had not prevented Iran from supplying medicine and basic commodities or from continuing to develop its oil sector.
"Today, we have access to a big part of our oil incomes through different methods and we are supplying basic commodities and medicine to people," he said.
"We had to import equipment from the US and Europe...it imposes delays but today we manufacture a major part of the requirement domestically...there is no doubt that oil development is possible by depending on domestic capabilities," he said.