Spokesman: Failure of US Maximum Pressure Displayed by Iran’s Hiked Oil Exports

“The Western media’s acknowledgement of Iran’s record-breaking oil exports over the past three years is another sign of the failure of maximum pressure on the Iranian people,” Bahadori Jahromi wrote on his twitter page on Saturday.

“Result-oriented foreign policy, without relying on Vienna and New York, has made sanctions ineffective and neutralized,” he added. 

His comments came after Reuters news agency in a report on Thursday cited figures by oil industry consultants and analysts, showing that Iranian crude exports started to surge in December and have continued to date.

The data suggested that most of Iranian oil shipments have gone to China as individual and private buyers in the country continue to defy illegal sanctions imposed by the US on Iran since 2018 when Washington pulled out of an international deal on Iran’s nuclear program known as the JCPOA.

An unidentified source told Reuters that Iranian oil exports in January rose to its peak in US sanctions era to 1.2 million bpd in January and then started to decline slightly later that month.

Figures by SVB International, a consulting firm that tracks Iranian oil supply, showed that crude exports from the country rose to 1.085 million bpd in January, up from 826,000 bpd in December.

The data showed that there has been no difference in the volume of shipments to date.

Consulting firm Petro-Logistics, another oil flow tracking company, provided figures to the Reuters showing that Iranian crude exports started to increase to over 1 million bpd in December before they fell back to around 700,000 bpd in January.

The new data confirms statements in recent weeks by Iranian government authorities suggesting that the country has managed to increase its oil exports since a new administration took office in Tehran in early August.

Iranian President Seyed Ebrahim Rayeesi said in January that his country was selling its crude oil and the revenues were returned to Iran.

President Rayeesi made the remarks, addressing a ceremony through video conferencing on the sidelines of his provincial visit to Hormozgan Province in Southern Iran.

He said that the country’s oil exports have increased by 40% and the revenues from oil exports return to the country.

The president also said that according to the statistics of the Central Bank, the inflation rate in the country is decreasing.