materialize anytime soon because Pakistan doesn’t have the capital needed to pull it off, an official confessed to an American diplomat, according to a US embassy cable published by WikiLeaks.
In the last few months, Iran and Pakistan have signed all the official papers required to make the natural gas pipeline a reality—except for the financing arrangements.
Iran talks about the pipeline as a done deal. In fact, Iran has announced that it has already built more than 80 percent of the pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Pakistani border.
An official, whose name was blacked out before the cable was posted on WikiLeaks, confided to the US diplomat in a private conversation on June 4, 2009, that he viewed near-term implementation of the gas link as “very unlikely,” the cable said.
The official indicated he had several reasons for this opinion, but the only one he elaborated on was that “the Pakistanis don’t have the money to pay for either the pipeline, or the gas,” the cable said.
The cable said the prospects for anyone trying to do business with Iran were dim.
The cable cited a panel discussion at the Baku Oil and Gas Show June 2-5, 2009, where several commentators mentioned the difficulty of doing business in “unpredictable, overly bureaucratic” Iran, and the “unreliabil-ity” of Iranian gas supply contracts previously reached with Turkey and Turkmenistan.
“For example, panelists recounted that, after long negotiations, Iran has four times failed to sign separate liquid national gas contracts at the last minute,” the cable said.
Two panelists said Iran had repeatedly diverted gas supplies meant for Turkey to meet domestic needs, thereby interrupting its contractual gas exports—and “has not paid contractual penalties for these violations,” the cable said.
“A source asserted bluntly that Iranian political leaders are totally focused on domestic needs and personal jockeying, and are simply not interested in hearing about the value of optimizing foreign gas exports,” the cable said.
The only exception, he claimed, was their interest in the notional prospect of annually exporting 10 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe, the cable said.
“He attributed this interest to a conviction that such a deal will significantly increase Iran’s political leverage in Europe and substantially insulate it from future European pressure”—a perception he characterized as revealing, and “typically” unrealistic,” the cable reported.
The European Union had already decided long before the cable was written that it would buy no Iranian gas so long as the nuclear issue had not been resolved with Iran.
