LATEST: Iran Media Seizes on 1 Sentence from Washington to Talk Up Prospects of Comprehensive Nuclear Agreement

Beset by a falling global oil price and with its exports still restricted by US-led sanctions, Iran is celebrating a bit of good news this week.

China’s oil imports from Iran rose 53% in November, compared to the previous month, to reach 517,560 barrels per day.

Iran’s biggest customer, China took 544,100 bpd in the first 11 months of 2014, up 29% over the same period last year. The figures are the highest since 2011, before US-led sanctions cut Iran’s oil exports by more than 40%.

Forecasts by Thomson Reuters Oil Analytics indicate that China’s imports in December could once again 500,000 bpd.

China has taken advantage of a November 2013 interim nuclear agreement between Iran and the 5+1 Powers, with limited easing of the sanctions on Tehran’s oil market, to increase its purchases. China’s state-run oil trader Zhuhai Zhenrong has renewed a pact with National Iranian Oil Company to buy the same volume of Iranian crude supplies as it did this year.

Iran has been suffering from a run of bad news because of the halving of the global oil price since June. The Government has had to revise its baseline for the 2015/2016 budget from $100 per barrel to $72; however, even this may not be sustainable given the drop in oil prices to below $60 per barrel this month.

Iranian officials has blamed Saudi Arabia for leadership of a “foreign plot” to cripple Iran. Riyadh has repeated, after OPEC agreed not to cut production, that it will not intervene to boost the oil price.


Iran Media Seizes on 1 Sentence from Washington to Talk Up Prospects of Comprehensive Nuclear Agreement

How much does the regime want a comprehensive nuclear agreement with the 5+1 Powers, including the US?

There’s a telling clue in a headline from the conservative Tasnim News, “US Says Comprehensive Nuclear Deal with Iran Closer Than Ever“.

Tasnim seizes on a single paragraph in a lengthy year-end review by State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf:

If you look at where we are today, when we started the year Iran’s nuclear program was not yet frozen, the JPOA [interim Joint Plan of Agreement] had not yet gone into effect. We are sitting at the negotiating table seeing if we can get a comprehensive agreement, closer than we’ve ever been to a comprehensive agreement while their program is frozen for the first time in a decade. That, I think, is a pretty significant achievement.

Prison Sentence for Facebook User Raised to 20 Years After He Makes An Appeal

The sentence of Masoud Seyed Talebi, over his posts on Facebook, has been raised from 15 to 20 years after he appealed the original prison term.

After the appeals panel remanded the case to the lower court for review, a judge added the charge of “insulting the sacred” and raised the sentence.

Talebi, an engineering student at Tehran Azad University, was among eight Facebook users arrested in October 2013. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 8 to 21 years in July 2014.