“Under the cover of circumventing the sanctions, oil was given to certain individuals and the Iranian nation was bypassed,” said Rouhani.
The president was alluding to dealers who used to sell Iran’s crude oil illegally after international sanctions were toughened against Iran.
Rouhani said Iran is trying to make its economic resistive enough to blunt the impact of sanctions.
“If our economy is strongly tied to the world economy, the enemy could not easily impose sanctions on us,” said the president.
“The West and industrialized countries feared that oil exporters may decide to boycott oil exports,” he said.
The International Monetary Fund said President Rouhani’s policies of reducing energy subsidies along with the easing of international sanctions have helped to steady Iran’s economy and cut inflation.
“The process of stabilization has taken hold and we do see the results already in a dramatic improvement in inflation,” Masood Ahmed, director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia department, said in Tehran.
Ahmed said that the lifting of some sanctions under a preliminary nuclear accord reached in November has helped the recovery, though he said growth is still “not what it needs to be to meet the aspirations of the Iranian people.”
Inflation dropped to about 15 percent last month, according to Iran’s central bank, from a peak of about 45 percent reported by the IMF before Rouhani’s election last year.
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