Rouhani not interested in bilateral talks with US

Iran oil tanker Grace 1 turns off tracker near Syria

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FE Team | Published: September 03, 2019 23:20:47

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TEHRAN, Sept 03 (Agencies): Iran's president has ruled out ever holding bilateral talks with the US.
"There have been a lot of offers for talks but our answer will always be negative," Hassan Rouhani told MPs.
But he said Iran would agree to resume multilateral talks if all US sanctions on Iran were lifted.
US President Donald Trump has said he is open to renegotiating a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers which Mr Trump unilaterally abandoned last year, reinstating sanctions.
The deal's other parties - the UK, France, Germany, China and Russia - have attempted to keep it alive. But the sanctions put in place by Mr Trump have caused Iran's oil exports to collapse, the value of its currency to plummet, and sent inflation soaring.
In July, after Mr Trump tightened the sanctions on Iranian oil exports in an attempt to force it to negotiate, Iran suspended two commitments enshrined in the deal.
Mr Rouhani has threatened a third, unspecified step unless European countries take action by Thursday to shield the Iranian economy from the sanctions' effects.
At the G7 summit last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was "convinced that an agreement" could be found if the US and Iranian presidents were to meet.
Mr Trump said Iranians were "hurting badly" and that he thought Mr Rouhani was "going to want to meet and get their situation straightened out".
The next day, Mr Rouhani signalled that he was ready for dialogue if the US first lifted its sanctions.
Meanwhile, an Iranian oil tanker pursued by the U.S. turned off its tracking beacon, leading to renewed speculation on Tuesday that it will head to Syria.
The disappearance of the Adrian Darya 1, formerly known as the Grace 1, follows a pattern of Iranian oil tankers turning off their Automatic Identification System to try and mask where they deliver their cargo amid U.S. sanctions targeting Iran's energy industry.
The Adrian Darya, which carries 2.1 million barrels of Iranian crude worth some $130 million, switched off its AIS beacon just before 1600 GMT Monday, according to the ship-tracking website MarineTraffic.com. The ship was some 45 nautical miles (83 kilometers) off the coast of Lebanon and Syria, heading north at its last report.
Earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had alleged the U.S. had intelligence that the Adrian Darya would head to the Syrian port of Tartus, just a short distance from its last reported position.
The actions of the Adrian Darya follow a pattern of other Iranian ships turning off their trackers once they reach near Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea, said Ranjith Raja, a lead analyst at the data firm Refinitiv.
Based on the fact Turkey has stopped taking Iranian crude oil and Syria historically has taken around one million barrels of crude oil a month from Iran, Raja said it was likely the ship would be offloading its cargo in Syria. That could see it transfer crude oil on smaller vessels, allowing it to be taken to port, he said.