Despite row Iran supplied India more oil in June
21 Jul 2011
London: Despite all the moaning over unpaid bills, Iran actually supplied more oil to India in June - up 14 per cent over May - according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Failure to settle on a payments mechanism, which would meet the sanctions regime of the United Nations, has resulted in amounts outstanding from India to Iran of $5 billion for crude oil imports.
The WSJ report did not name its sources.
Iran and India have been trying to sort out a payment logjam since December after India's central bank barred transactions through the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) for payment of crude oil imports from Iran.
The ACU is a regional transaction facility.
The WSJ reports says India's crude purchases from Iran, its second-largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia, have remained more or less the same over the last two years and even went up in June as compared with May.
Iran's oil deliveries to India went up to 400,000 barrels a day in June, up from 350,000 barrels a day in May, according to the unnamed source. It said the source was not an Iranian official but was familiar with the trades.