"Iran raised the amount of its natural gas exported to Iraq from 3 million mcm to 7 million mcm on Sunday, with the hope that the amount would be raised to 15 million mcm soon," Musa told Rudaw English.
Iran slashed its energy exports to Iraq in December because Baghdad was “in debt of more than five billion dollars," the state-run National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) said in a statement in December.
Iran’s natural gas exports to its western neighbor fell from 50 million mcm a day to just three mcm – cutting the amount of electricity Iraq could produce by up to a third.
Iranian energy minister Reza Ardakanian visited Baghdad on December 30 to discuss Iraqi debt repayments that were either delayed or could not be accessed due to US banking sanctions on Tehran.
Iraq paid off a “considerable part” of its debt to Iranian state energy companies, Ardakanian said after the meeting, and Iran agreed to the immediate resumption of natural gas exports.
Part of the debt was being repaid through a goods exchange, Iran-Iraq Joint Chamber of Commerce member Sayed Hamid Hosseini told IRNA on December 29.
In February 2019, Iran Central Bank Governor Abdolreza Hemmati signed a trade exchange agreement with his Iraqi counterpart Ali Alaq in Baghdad to settle the accumulated debts and facilitate the transfer of future payments for exports.
But this financial mechanism appears to have failed, leaving Iran unable to access three billion dollars' worth of Iraq's debt repayments deposited in the Trade Bank of Iraq (TBI), the NGIC said in December.
Iran is unable to access the funds deposited in the TBI due to US banking sanctions, which were re-introduced in 2018 after the United States withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
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