TEHRAN – The Governor of Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Abdolnasser Hemmati said on Friday that without proper banking relations between Iran and Turkey, reaching their $30 billion goal of bilateral trade would be impossible.

“Achieving the $30-billion trade target between Iran and Turkey will inevitably require development of monetary and banking relations between the two countries,” Hemmati said in an Instagram post.

Mentioning his meeting with Turkey’s new Central Bank Governor Murat Uysal, the official noted that “The presidents of Iran and Turkey are determined for boosting the volume of trade between the two countries.”

The CBI Governor visited the Turkish capital to hold mutual talks on expansion of banking and monetary cooperation.

Leading a delegation of banking managers, Abdolnaser Hemmati left Tehran for Ankara on Thursday morning to meet with his Turkish counterpart. 

In the meeting, the two sides conferred on the development of bilateral banking and monetary ties.

Iran and Turkey are working on a financial mechanism channel to bypass the U.S. unilateral sanctions, Iran’s Ambassador to Turkey Mohammad Farazmand announced in early June.

While the U.S. unilateral sanctions against Iran have created some limitations for trade with the Western partners which led the Islamic Republic to expand economic and trade ties with its neighbors and boost non-oil exports to them, trade with the northwestern neighbor, Turkey, is growing significantly.

The statistics recently released about Iran’s trade during spring, which corresponds to the first quarter of Iranian calendar year, indicate that the country’s value of non-oil exports to

Turkey has risen five folds compared to the same period of time in the previous year.

Iran exported $2.235 billion of non-oil products to Turkey in spring of this year, rising 430 percent from $421 million in spring of the previous year.
For the expansion of trade with the neighboring countries, Iran has also put boosting trade via border areas on agenda.

In this due, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has been recently made between Iran and Turkey for the expansion of bilateral border trade.

EF/MA