Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the country has set up a mechanism matching the European Union’s mechanism for trade with Iran (the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges or INSTEX) and informed the EU about the issue.
Speaking at a meeting in Tehran on Monday with Vito Rosario Petrocelli, the president of the Italian Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Zarif pointed to the strong ties between the Islamic Republic and the European country over the past 40 years and expressed hope that its current government would preserve the “good economic relations” with Iran.
He further said Iran has established the mechanism commensurate with the EU’s INSTEX and informed the block about the establishment.
The Italian senator, for his part, praised Tehran-Rome ties as age-old and called for efforts to deepen the bilateral relations.
He further announced that an Italy-Iran parliamentary friendship group has been formed in the Italian Senate.
Iran’s mechanism which is called the Special Trade and Finance Institute (STFI) was introduced in March after technical and expert negotiations between Iranian delegations and representatives from three European countries (Britain, France and Germany).
The move is the result of the efforts made by the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) and a group of Iranian governmental and private banks and a number of companies will participate in it.
Earlier, the president of the INSTEX traveled to Tehran to hold talks with senior Iranian officials on ways to make the mechanism operational.
INSTEX is based in Paris and managed by the German banking expert Per Fischer.
The three European countries that are signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are reportedly going to use the channel initially only to sell food, medicine and medical devices in Iran.
In May 2018, the US president pulled his country out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that was achieved in Vienna in 2015 after years of negotiations among Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).
Following the US withdrawal, Iran and the remaining parties launched talks to save the accord.
