Bottom Line: Newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rohani has
chosen his new oil minister, but the Supreme Leader is sending signals
that the choice is not acceptable to hardliners.
Analysis: Rohani has chosen Bijan Namdar Zanganeh for the country’s new oil minister. Zanganeh has served as oil minister before, under president Mohammad Khatami. He left the post in 2005. Hardliners see him as too soft and there feathers were particularly ruffled by Zanganeh’s record of selling gas below market prices to foreign countries. That the Iranian Supreme Leader is against Zanganeh’s appointment was made clear in a scathing criticism of him that appeared in an Iranian newspaper controlled by the Supreme Leader’s camp.
They are setting Zanganeh up for public criticism as an untrustworthy figure who does not work in the national interest. At this point it is unclear where the new oil minister would stand on current Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi’s recently announced plans to move towards the production of oil products for domestic use and exports and away from crude exports with the launch of construction of the new Zanjan refinery this week. This is in line with an April announcement by Iran that it planned to complete four new refineries by March 2014.
Recommendation: As we mentioned in last week’s briefing, we see opportunities ahead in Iran, and we will thus be focusing a significant amount of attention on developments here as they…
Analysis: Rohani has chosen Bijan Namdar Zanganeh for the country’s new oil minister. Zanganeh has served as oil minister before, under president Mohammad Khatami. He left the post in 2005. Hardliners see him as too soft and there feathers were particularly ruffled by Zanganeh’s record of selling gas below market prices to foreign countries. That the Iranian Supreme Leader is against Zanganeh’s appointment was made clear in a scathing criticism of him that appeared in an Iranian newspaper controlled by the Supreme Leader’s camp.
They are setting Zanganeh up for public criticism as an untrustworthy figure who does not work in the national interest. At this point it is unclear where the new oil minister would stand on current Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi’s recently announced plans to move towards the production of oil products for domestic use and exports and away from crude exports with the launch of construction of the new Zanjan refinery this week. This is in line with an April announcement by Iran that it planned to complete four new refineries by March 2014.
Recommendation: As we mentioned in last week’s briefing, we see opportunities ahead in Iran, and we will thus be focusing a significant amount of attention on developments here as they…
No comments:
Post a Comment