Falling Oil Price Scenario A Nonstarter: Iran President
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani gave an assurance on Tuesday that the country will not buckle under the plummeting oil prices, saying other crude producers will bear the brunt of the orchestrated drop in crude prices.
“Those who have engineered the reduction in the price of oil to damage certain countries will regret and could not keep to such a path,” Rouhani said in an address to huge gathering of people in the southern city of Bushehr on Tuesday.
“If the decreasing oil price is to inflict losses on Iran, you should know that other (oil) producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will incur more losses,” the president added.
The president also pointed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait’s heavy dependence on oil incomes, explaining that only one-third of the next year’s budget of Iran relies on petrodollars.
President Rouhani also noted that the downward trend in the price of oil “could not continue for a long time,” stressing that “Iran will not be put under pressure of oil price slump.”
Over the past six months, the oil prices have fallen more than 50 percent due to a glut of supplies by certain oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia.
Earlier on Saturday, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei described the decline in oil price in a short period of time as a political and non-economic move.
Speaking in a meeting with the visiting President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro in Tehran, Ayatollah Khamenei added, “Our common enemies are using oil as a political weapon, and they (enemies) definitely play a role in such a sharp drop in oil price."