February 07 2020
Iran says that Baghdad hasn’t paid a penny in almost a year for the natural gas it imports from Iran, blaming US sanctions, though the Americans have given Iraq an exemption from sanctions just so they can buy Iranian gas.
Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar-Zanganeh said January 26, “They do not pay us any money for the gas they import.” He said the last payment from Baghdad was $2 billion 11 months ago in February 2019.
“The Iraqis put the blame on sanctions and banking restrictions imposed by the US,” he said, without mentioning the US sanction exemption for Iraq or the fact that Iran gets billions of dollars through banks every month for other exports to Iraq.
Tehran exports 20 million cubic meters of gas daily to Iraq and 30 million daily to Turkey.
Zanganeh said deliveries to Turkey have not been disrupted, while deliveries to Iraq have declined “due to technical problems, and not due to unsettled debts.”
Feeding the confusion, Faisal al-Haimus, head of the Trade Bank of Iraq, through which Iraq has paid for gas in the past, told Agence France Presse, “we will stop” processing payments for the gas in February if the US does not renew the waiver due to expire then. That indicated his bank was paying Iran.
And further feeding the confusion still, Hamid Hossaini, spokesman for the Iranian, Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Association (OPEX) was quoted January 29 by state broadcasting as saying Iraq had paid $5 billion in dinars into a special account in its Central Bank for the fuel but Iran could not access it because of US “economic terrorism.” He was quoted as saying Iran’s private exporters can ship goods to Iraq and receive payment, “but the conditions for transferring revenues from exports of electricity and gas are different.”
No one has straightened out this mass of conflicting remarks.
There was some suspicion Zanganeh might have been trying to set up a justification for reducing gas deliveries to Iraq. The Financial Tribune said Iran’s domestic consumption of gas is rising close to its maximum production because of the bitter winter. In fact, to keep deliveries to gas users up, the Energy Ministry has acknowledged that it is using more heavily polluting mazut to run its power plants so it can leave natural gas for heating residences.