Three European Companies Ready to Sell Radars to Iran
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Three major European companies have voiced their readiness to sell radars and navigation equipment to Iran, an Iranian aviation official announced on Monday.
Iran has had meetings with three major European companies from France, Italy, and Spain to purchase radar systems and navigation equipment for its airways and airports, Mohammad Ali Ilkhani, the managing director of the Iranian Airports Company (IAC) said.
Ilkhani described the return of foreign companies to Iran as one of the results of Tehran’s negotiations with world powers (over its civilian nuclear program) and stressed that last year such companies did not even negotiate with Iran.
The aviation official stressed, however, that now these companies voluntarily come to the country and voice their readiness to sell their equipment to Iran with official letters from their governments. "This enables us to purchase goods with higher qualities in lower prices in international tenders," he added.
“These companies are among the best and biggest companies in the world,” the IAC managing director said, adding that one of them produces 35% of the world’s navigation aids.
On November 24, 2013, Iran and six world powers signed an interim nuclear deal in the Swiss city of Geneva.
According to the breakthrough agreement (the Joint Plan of Action), which came into effect on January 20, the world powers agreed to suspend some non-essential sanctions and to impose no new nuclear-related bans in return for Tehran's decision to suspend its 20% enrichment for a period of six months.
In recent years, the US and its Western allies have imposed cruel sanctions on Iran under the pretext that the country's peaceful nuclear program might have a covert drive towards acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
Iranian officials assert that the US and some other Western states use the nuclear issue as an excuse to pile up pressure on the Islamic Republic which has faced the US-led sanctions for the past several decades following the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in the country.
Iran, a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, considers nuclear enrichment an inalienable right, and has on numerous occasions reiterated that it wants nuclear energy for purely peaceful purposes, and that it is on religious, ethical and practical grounds opposed to nuclear weapons.