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Foreign companies, investors line up to enter Iranian market

17 April 2015 [09:09] - TODAY.AZ

/By AzerNews - Sara Rajabova/

Foreign companies and investors are competing to enter the Iranian market in anticipation western powers will lift all sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Russian oil company Lukoil has already reopened its offices in Iran in anticipation of the removal of economic sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear program.

UPI quoted Ravil Maganov,Lukoil deputy vice president as saying that the company was back in Iran.

"We look forward to participating in projects in Iran after the sanctions are fully removed. We are studying geological data on other projects as well," he said.

Lukoil said it started work in the Anaran reserve area near the border with Iraq in 2003, but was later forced to pull out of Iran over sanctions.

A joint venture between Lukoil and Norway's Statoil was aimed at developing part of the Anaran block that extends across the Iraqi border. The two companies wrote off the project in 2010 because of international sanctions imposed on the Iranian banking system.

In the same year, the company stopped supplying diesel fuel and gasoline to Iran.

Lukoil suffered a $63 million loss when it was forced to withdraw from the project.

The director of Iran's National Petroleum Company has recently said foreign investors "will flock to Iran" once a recent joint statement between Tehran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany manifests into a comprehensive nuclear deal before July.

Foreign oil companies like Shell and Total have already expressed enthusiasm in returning to Iran, as soon as the sanctions against the country are lifted.

Iran said it has received signals from international oil giants that they are interested in Iran’s oil and gas projects as soon as sanctions that ban investments in the country’s energy projects are removed.

Iran holds the world's fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves and the second-largest natural gas reserves. Iran’s total in-place oil reserves have been estimated at more than 560 billion barrels, with about 140 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Heavy and extra-heavy varieties of crude oil account for roughly 70-100 billion barrels of the total reserves.

Moreover, a group of European investors will be visiting Tehran in a few weeks to assess opportunities in the Middle East’s second largest economy, Press TV reported.

They are being represented by London-based boutique investment bank First Frontier on their first visit to Iran following “a year’s worth of laying the groundwork for investment into Iran”.

Nicholas Banszky, chairman of First Frontier, said Iran represents a tremendous investment potential, hoping the trip will result in a long and fruitful involvement.

First Frontier has tied up with an Iranian investment banking firm, The Agah Group, to provide research on the country’s leading companies, Banszky said.

Furthermore, foreign aircraft industries have been competing to get into a deal with Iran once sanctions against the country over its nuclear program are lifted.

Alireza Jahangirian, the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization said many aircraft manufacturers have visited the country in the past year, even before the recent Tehran-P5+1 statement in Switzerland on the Iranian nuclear program, which laid the ground for further negotiations toward a comprehensive nuclear deal.

He said these companies have been in talks with Iranian airlines and the CAO over Iran’s air transport.

In February, Iran said it had concluded three contracts with the U.S. aviation giant Boeing after it signed the Geneva nuclear agreement with the P5+1 group of countries in the late 2013.

Last year, major U.S. aerospace manufacturers, Boeing and General Electric, applied for export licenses in order to sell airliner parts to Iran following the November 2013 deal.

URL: http://www.today.az/news/regions/139931.html

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