TEHRAN – Head of Iran’s Budget and Planning Organization (BPO) said the government has paid 395 trillion rials (over $9.4 billion) for financing development projects across the country in the first nine months of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21-December 22).

Speaking in a ceremony for inauguration of a housing project in the northeastern province of South Khorasan, Mohammad-Baqer Nobakht said: “Based on the statistics for the last nine months, we have paid 35 trillion tomans [350 trillion rials] for various development projects throughout the country and thousands of billions more will be paid in the coming months”, ILNA reported.

“In spite of all the difficulties, we are still paying all our dues including government employees’ wages, retirees’ pensions, and the payments to all the groups covered by support agencies, just like before,” he said.

Back in October, Nobakht announced that the government is going to allocate all revenues from oil sales to the development projects following structural reforms in the next Iranian calendar year’s (March 2020-March 2021) budget bill.

According to the official, 430 trillion rials (about $10.2 billion) is allocated for development projects in the next year’s budget plan, up 53 percent from the figure for the current year.

“We intend to invest as much as we can in the development sector in the next [Iranian calendar] year (starts on March 19, 2020), so we have increased the budget for this sector by 53 percent to achieve significant growth,” Nobakht said.

President Hassan Rouhani submitted the administration’s draft of the national budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year 1399, which starts on March 20, 2020, to the Majlis in early December.

The main characteristic of the next year's budget bill which makes it different from previous years' budget bills, is the impact of the U.S. sanctions on the country's economy and the consequent considerations which have been taken into account in preparing it.

The next year’s budget bill has been modified in terms of resources, expenditures, policies, and objectives, considering the resistance against the U.S. sanctions.

EF/MA