India and Iran are talking to non-euro countries and territories to settle payments for Iranian oil imports to the Asian nation, a senior Indian government official told Reuters on Thursday. The official, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, said he expected an early resolution of the issue which was triggered after the United States stepped up pressure to roll back trade with Iran.
-- India continues to import Iranian oil despite no payments
"We are speaking to non euro jurisdictions, payments may have to be routed in other currencies, but this is one of the options on the table," the official said on the sidelines of a summit of major economies in southern China.
India had earlier agreed to stop payments for Iranian oil imports via a Hamburg-based bank handling international trade for Iranian companies, a conduit set up to break an impasse after the Reserve Bank of India scrapped a long-standing mechanism in December.
The German conduit had drawn strong disapproval from the United States, which suspects Iran is using its oil money to make nuclear weapons. Washington had praised the Indian central bank's move, which came little more than a month after US President Barrack Obama visited India. Iran denies the allegations and insists its programme is for peaceful energy needs.
Indian finance ministry and central bank officials met last Thursday in New Delhi to hammer out a solution, but none emerged during that meeting. Four days later, Iran's economy minister said the dispute had been solved, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
India's imports of about 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil from Iran have continued, despite the lack of payments, on undertakings from state-run oil companies which are long-standing customers. India, Asia's third-largest oil consumer, imports over two-thirds of its oil needs and depends heavily on volumes from the Middle East to power its economy, which is growing around 9 percent per year.
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