Iran shrugs off EU oil ban

01-06-2012 • www.telegraph.co.uk

The National Iranian Oil Company said demand was so high for Iranian oil that it would have no trouble selling it elsewhere.

"We hope that Iran's oil is not sanctioned officially but if so we have taken the needed arrangements," the company's director of international affairs, Mohsen Qamsari, was quoted as saying in a report on Iran's oil ministry website.

The 27-nation European Union has struck "an agreement in principle" to ban Iranian oil imports, an EU diplomat in Brussels told AFP.

Negotiations were ongoing to determine when the ban should start, though France said it hoped to see it announced at an EU foreign ministers' meeting on end of January.

The West's sanctions squeeze on Iran stems from fears the country is trying to develop an atom bomb under cover of a nuclear programme it insists is exclusively for peaceful, civilian use.