In an address to a gathering of people in the southern Iranian province of Bushehr on Tuesday, President Rouhani said, “Iran won’t be pressured by the slump in oil prices” as it has envisaged economic plans to compensate for the drop.
Rouhani said that his administration has based the country's budget on the lowest ever dependency on oil revenues, adding that oil sales account for only one third of Iran’s budget.
“Those who have engineered the reduction in the price of oil to damage certain countries will regret and could not keep to such a path,” Rouhani said in an address to huge gathering of people in the southern city of Bushehr on Tuesday.
“If the decreasing oil price is to inflict losses on Iran, you should know that other (oil) producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will incur more losses,” the president added.
The president also pointed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait’s heavy dependence on oil incomes, explaining that only one-third of the next year’s budget of Iran relies on petrodollars.
President Rouhani also noted that the downward trend in the price of oil “could not continue for a long time,” stressing that “Iran will not be put under pressure of oil price slump.”
Over the past six months, the oil prices have fallen more than 50 percent due to a glut of supplies by certain oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia.