India Will Keep Buying Iranian Oil
Wednesday, 18 January 2012, 16:16 IST
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New Delhi: India said it will continue buying Iranian oil despite U.S. sanctions and is not about to seek a waiver from Washington. "We have accepted sanctions which are made by the United Nations. Other sanctions do not apply to individual countries," Ranjan Mathai, Foreign Secretary, told reporters. "We continue to buy oil from Iran," he replied when asked whether India was seeking waiver from the U.S. sanctions, cleared December 31, which seek to penalize any financial institutions dealing with Iran's central bank. "A delegation is on its way to work out the mechanism for continued purchase of oil from Iran and to work out the financing mechanism," Mathai said. The delegation is expected to come back in a couple of days and report to the government. It is expected to explore a rupee-rial barter trade mechanism allowing India to directly trade with Teheran. Many European countries like Greece continue to buy oil from Iran, added Mathai. In the wake of the U.S. sanctions on Tehran, India, which imports around 12 percent of its oil from Iran, is keeping "all options open" to continue purchasing Iranian oil and find ways of paying for it. The U.S. has, however, mounted a diplomatic offensive to get key players and importers of Iranian oil like India, China and Russia to implement sanctions against Iran. India has made it clear that it will abide by the U.N. sanctions on Iran but has contended that unilateral sanctions by some countries (a reference to the U.S.) affect the market and hurts its genuine interests of energy security. India has been in a fix for the last one year on finding a viable mechanism to pay for Iranian oil after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) scrapped the Asian Clearing Union, which served as a clearing house for trading with Iran. For some time, India routed its payments through a German bank and later a Turkish bank but the U.S. sanctions have made these options unviable.
Source: IANS
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