TEHRAN - The 116th dialogue council of the government and the private sector was held in Tehran on Tuesday, in which the council announced preparing a special proposal package for managing the foreign currency market.

The meeting was attended by senior officials including Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Ehsan Khandouzi, Head of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (ICCIMA) Gholam-Hossein Shafeie, and Agriculture Minister Javad Sadatinejad, the ICCIMA portal reported.

In his opening speech as the chairman of the council, Khandouzi mentioned the recent fluctuations in the forex market and their direct impact on the activities of traders and manufacturers, saying: “The government has tried to curb these abnormal fluctuations, and accordingly new changes have been made in the country's foreign exchange policies; we hope these changes will help to return stability to the market, however, at the moment we are witnessing the direct effects of this situation on the costs of all kinds of products and services.”

The minister noted that the secretariat of the dialogue council will prepare a draft of the mentioned proposal package and present it to the government within 48 hours.

“We will ask the first vice president to present this proposed package in a meeting with the members of the cabinet and the governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI),” he added.

Further, in the meeting, ICCIMA Head Gholam-Hossein Shafeie welcomed the idea of the proposal package and criticized the exclusion of the representative of the ICCIMA from the meetings of the Foreign Exchange Action Committee, which has been held at the CBI for several months.

“The chambers of commerce, guilds, and cooperatives, as always, present the suggested solutions this time through the dialogue council secretariat, but the government must pay attention to these solutions in order to get out of the current situation,” Shafeie said.

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