TEHRAN – Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said on Monday that the country’s oil industry will not yield to pressure from the United States, Shana reported.

Reacting to the news of Washington sanctioning the minister, Zanganeh twitted: “U.S. sanctions against me and my colleagues are a passive reaction to Washington’s failure to cut [Iran’s] oil exports to zero.”

“The era of unilateralism is over in the world. Iran’s oil industry will not be hamstrung,” Zanganeh added.

Zanganeh is a veteran of Iran’s oil sector and widely seen as a skillful technocrat who shepherded the Islamic Republic’s revival within OPEC after the 2015 nuclear deal, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The architect of the Iranian oil industry’s post-sanctions recovery, Zanganeh helped secure several multibillion-dollar joint-ventures with foreign investors, including France’s Total SA and China National Petroleum Corp, the report said.

According to Bloomberg, the new sanctions are aimed to increase pressure on Iran ahead of the Nov. 3 election, partly to help ensure that a potential Joe Biden administration would find it more difficult to ease sanctions.

The U.S. announced new restrictions on Iran’s financial sector this month while adding 18 new banks to the list of its sanctions.

Many experts and analysts believe that the new sanctions are not going to have any meaningful impact on the oil market or on the country’s economy.

Earlier on Sunday, U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien said that the U.S. has little opportunity left to impose new sanctions against Russia and Iran, as there are already many of them.

“One of the problems that we have faced with both Iran and Russia is that we now have so many sanctions against these countries that we have very little (opportunity) to do anything about it,” O’Brien told journalists.

EF/MA