Alwaght- India says the US agreed to grant it a waiver from forthcoming anti-Iranian sanctions to continue oil imports from Iran less than a week before US re-imposes oil ban on the Islamic Republic.
According to the agreement, the Indian companies will be allowed to import 1.25 million tons of oil a month from Iran until March.
The US President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal on May 8 and reinstated the first wave of sanctions on Iran, saying the next wave will come on November 4.
India had imported about 22 million tons of crude oil from Iran in 2017-18 and planned to raise that to about 30 million tons in 2018-19, according to the Financial Times website.
The signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal, which eased the sanctions on Iran, said that they will try to keep the agreement alive. The European parties of the deal said they will create a financial transaction channel to allow money transfer between Iran and the EU.
China and India, two major Iranian oil buyers, said that they will continue crude imports from Iran regardless of the US embargo.
Since May, the US has been lobbying for an alliance against Iran, insisting that it will seek to cut the Iranian oil exports to “zero.”
But Washington did not get much support to its anti-Iranian pressures. Nearly a month ago, India said it finalized a contract with Iran to buy 9 million oil barrels from the National Iranian Oil Company after November.
The waiver decision comes a day after Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, the most anti-Iranian diplomat in the administration, said yesterday that Washington does not want to harm its allies and friends by the anti-Tehran embargo.
“We want to achieve maximum pressure but we don’t want to harm friends and allies either,” Bolton said during his talk at the Hamilton Society.
Responding to the American threats of oil ban and economic strain, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran on Wednesday said that the US cannot zero the Iranian oil exports because the Islamic republic’s oil has its firmly-standing customers assuring the people that the Americans will retreat.
“November 4 this year translates into a new instance of oppression by America,” he said, adding “our people need to rest assure that the government is not afraid of US threats,” he went on during his address to the weekly cabinet session.
“We are certain that the Americans will fail in their new plot, and that they are actually in gradual retreat,” the president asserted.
