TEHRAN:
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Thursday he had held
"constructive and fruitful" talks in Japan on repatriating some of
Tehran's assets frozen under international sanctions.
Iran and
world powers reached a deal in November under which Tehran agreed to
temporarily curb parts of its controversial nuclear programme in
exchange for limited relief from international sanctions, which included
effectively shutting Iran out of the international banking system.
Iran
has had said it wants to use Japanese, South Korean and Swiss banks to
handle international trade exempted from Western sanctions under the
November deal.
Zarif, who met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
and Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida Wednesday, said "we reached practical
and executive agreement in different areas including the implementation
of the financial parts of the Geneva deal, whose results will become
clear in banking transactions very soon."
The official IRNA news
agency said Zarif, who posted his remarks on Facebook, also asked Japan
to play a "more active role" in freeing up Iranian petrodollars, of
which a "large part is in Japan."
Japan has traditionally been a major importer of Iranian oil.
The
same mechanism would be used for revenues from the slightly more than
one million barrels per day in oil exports Iran is allowed to make under
the agreement, expected to generate some $15 billion (10.9 billion
euros).
And it would handle Iran's petrochemical exports, fully
exempted from sanctions, which previously ran at just over $8 billion a
year.
In addition, it would be used to manage some $4.2 billion in
frozen assets that the European Union and the United States are to
release in stages during the next six months.
The United States,
other Western powers and Israel have long suspected Iran of using its
civil nuclear energy programme as a cover for developing atomic weapons,
a charge denied by Tehran.
In return for eased sanctions, Iran
undertook to limit enrichment of uranium to five percent purity, halting
enrichment to the higher levels that had prompted Western concern on
whether its intentions were entirely peaceful.
It also undertook
to neutralise existing stockpiles of higher-enriched uranium and to
suspend work on a heavy water reactor it had been building.
Talks aimed at reaching a comprehensive and permanent deal are to begin in New York next month.
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