“Iran has always been ready to counter such hostile actions and we are not concerned at all about the sanctions,” Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in a joint news conference with visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
“We have taken provisional measures. We have weathered the storm for the past 32 years and we will be able to survive this as well,” Salehi said. “These sanctions are an economic war against us,” Economy Minister Shamseddin Hosseini said.
Diplomats in Brussels said on Wednesday that the 27-nation EU bloc has reached an “agreement in principle” to ban Iranian oil imports and was discussing the timing of when the measure would begin. The ban would add to other sanctions already imposed by the West, including a US measure enacted last weekend that targets Iran’s central bank, which processes most of Iran’s oil sales.
The EU is the second-biggest destination for Iranian oil after China, accounting for around 15 percent of the 2.6 million barrels exported each day, or some 450,000 barrels.
After plummeting to an all-time low against the dollar on Monday, in the wake of the new US sanctions, Iran’s central bank stepped in to shore up the rial by imposing a capped exchange rate.
After many exchange bureaux refused to sell dollars at that level, authorities seemed to drop that artificial rate, and on Thursday the rial was trading at 16,000 to the dollar — off its record low but still very weak.