Iran MPs approve Rouhani’s pick for ministry of industry
Iran’s parliament has approved President Hassan Rouhani’s pick for trade and industry minister after rejecting his previous nominee in August.
Ali Reza Razmhosseini on Tuesday got 175 votes at the chamber to take on the post, Parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said. There were 264 lawmakers at the session and 80 of them voted against him, while nine abstained.
Rouhani proposed Razmhosseini, the governor of the northeastern province of Khorasan Razavi, for the post after the parliament rejected his previous nominee Hossein Modarres Khiabani.
The president had to secure the parliament’s blessing after sacking his former minister of industry, mine and trade, Reza Rahmani, at one of the most chaotic moments in the automotive sector in May.
At the time, the Iranian auto industry was the subject of fierce criticism over prices of domestic products which had soared by up to 60 percent.
Iran is currently grappling with the most aggressive US sanctions ever, which were initially imposed with the aim of drying up the country’s oil revenues.
The Trump administration has broadened the scope of the sanctions on steel, aluminum, copper and iron trade.
As a result, Iran’s currency has dropped to its lowest value ever against the dollar, but the steep devaluation of the rial has also served to make Iranian exports more competitive abroad.
In the year leading up to March 2020, Iran’s economy generated $41.3 billion of export revenue from nonoil goods and around half of this total was from manufactured goods.
In the same period, Iran’s oil exports totaled just $9 billion, marking a historic moment in its modern economic history where the country’s industrial sector, which employs around one-third of the labor force, earned double the export revenue generated by the country’s oil sector.
From March 2019 to March 2020, China was the top destination for nonoil exports, with Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Afghanistan rounding out the top five destinations.
