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Indian oil refiners to clear payment backlog to Iran soon Iran

Indian oil refiners will clear around €6 billion ($6.7 billion) of outstanding debt to Iran through Turkey’s Halkbank soon, a senior Iranian economy official said on Wednesday.India is one of the biggest buyers of Iranian crude and built up a payments backlog when Iran was under Western sanctions, with its refiners owing about $6.5 billion to Iran. They cleared around $770 million in euros through Halkbank to the National Iranian Oil Co. (NIOC) in May.“As per the instructions of the Central Bank of Iran, the local banks in India will transfer the money to Halkbank,” Sadegh Akbari, Iran’s general director for foreign economic relations, told reporters at a conference in Istanbul. Asked when the remaining funds would be cleared, he said “in a short period of time” but declined to comment further.

Asked when the remaining funds would be cleared, he said “in a short period of time” but declined to comment further. SWIFT this year reconnected a number of Iranian banks to its system, allowing them to resume cross-border transactions with foreign banks. Iranian banks were disconnected from Belgium-based SWIFT in March 2012 as international sanctions tightened against Tehran over its disputed nuclear programme. Reuters