Iran’s oil tankers preparing to return to EU ports
Iran says the success of Iran and P5+1 to reach mutual understanding on solutions to move toward a final comprehensive nuclear agreement over Iran’s nuclear energy program has already paved the way for Iranian oil tankers to resume visits to European ports.
Ali Akbar Safaie, the managing director of the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), said on Sunday that his company had started to negotiate with European countries over the return of Iranian tankers to their ports before.
Safaie said the required procedures for this to begin have already been planned. However, he emphasized, the resumption of visits by NITC tankers to Europe will only take place after Iran and P5+1 reach the final nuclear agreement and the sanctions on Iran are accordingly lifted.
Over a week of talks between top diplomats of Iran and the P5+1 in the Swiss city of Lausanne culminated in a joint statement on Thursday in which the sides said they had reached understanding over solutions to move ahead toward drafting a comprehensive nuclear agreement before 30 June. A key point of Lausanne statement was a promise to lift the economic sanctions on Iran.
NITC is a subsidiary of NIOC and transports Iranian crude to export markets. The company has a fleet of 60 VLCC supertankers with a total transport capacity of 100 million tons and is considered as the biggest tanker company in the Middle East and 4th in the world. It is currently a main target in the long list of economic sanctions against Iran.
Over the past year, NITC was taken off - and later again returned to - the list of sanctioned Iranian entities by the European Union. In July, the EU General Court – the bloc’s second-highest court - ruled that there were no grounds to blacklist the NITC after it contested the designation. However, in this past February, the EU again sanctioned NITC – a move that immediately drew criticisms from Tehran.
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