Iran has received 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) from India in the last 10 days for long overdue oil debts, indicating the likely end of a sanctions-related problem that had blocked payments all year, an Iranian official said on Monday. Indian refiners expect Iran to resume 400,000 barrels a day of oil exports in September, following an uncertain August, now that they have been able to start paying the debt that Deputy Oil Minister Ahmad Qalebani said amounted to $4.8 billion.
India, Asia's third-largest economy and Iran's second-largest oil buyer after China, racked up the debt after the Reserve Bank of India scrapped a clearing house system last December - a move welcomed by Washington as it tries to isolate the Islamic Republic. Sources in India told Reuters that refiners had paid about $1.43 billion through Turkey's state-controlled Halkbank . The refiners hope to settle immediately payable debts in the next few days, the sources said.
Qalebani, who is also managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), denied that the Indian payments problem - one of Iran's biggest headaches to come out of the US-led sanctions drive - was spreading to other key markets. "So far there is no report from Iran's Central Bank of any problems with Korea or China, so our assumption is there is no problem with other countries except India," he said, pointing out the central bank was the body in charge of co-ordinating payments.
Korean government sources told Reuters last week that Iran could face a problem of nearly $5 billion of cash trapped in South Korea by the end of the year as sanctions stop it from repatriating money from oil sales. Tehran has previously denied a Financial Times report last month that sanctions might have prevented China from paying as much as $30 billion for oil from Iran. Washington has tightened sanctions on Iran, which it accuses of seeking nuclear weapons, something Tehran denies.
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