Tabnak – While the first round of the new phase of US sanctions against Iran has come to effect since three days ago, the European countries are showing more decisiveness in their desire to preserve the Iran nuclear deal.
In this vein, Iran says it will in all likelihood receive the necessary trade and banking guarantees from Europe to sustain the 2015 nuclear deal, which the United States has withdrawn from and which Washington has been attempting to break up.
In an interview with the Iran Daily published on Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif referred to an array of measures being prepared or taken by Europe to keep the deal economically meaningful for Iran and sounded optimistic that those measures would be effective.
In the interview, Zarif has voiced tacit satisfaction with the measures taken by the EU to preserve the deal, but stressed that they were yet to take actual effect and had to be implemented more quickly.
“Europe’s package of proposals [to Iran] has clear delineations, and the general ideas in it have been enumerated. Among them is to keep banking channels for financial transactions with Iran open and to preserve [Iran’s] oil sales at their current level. The sanctions that have to do with these areas will come in November,” he said.
He also referred to other European efforts to sustain the deal, including the activation of a “blocking statute” to protect those European businesses that choose to stay in Iran from American penalties and, notably, lobbying with non-European countries to either start buying Iran’s oil or increase their purchases of crude from the country.
“During my [recent] trip to Singapore..., I concluded that the Europeans are not only working to sustain the JCPOA inside of Europe but that they have taken extensive measures [to that effect] outside of it, too,” Zarif added, using an abbreviation to refer to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the official title of the 2015 Iran deal.
He said the Europeans have asked other countries to open bank accounts for Iran’s Central Bank — to facilitate direct transactions and non-reliance on the American financial system — and said Europe itself is currently working to do the same.
Zarif’s remarks come as, in a related development, Iran’s Embassy in UK has finally reopened its bank account in the country after years. The embassy’s bank account was closed since 2009 due to the sanctions imposed by the West on the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program.
The reopening of the embassy’s banking account comes about one year after Iranian ambassador to the UK Hamid Baeidinejad criticized British banks for their “unwillingness to deal with the Islamic Republic.”
