Iran plans to open oil bourse on Kish island Reuters 05/06/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)
Baku: Iran plans to launch an oil bourse on the Gulf island of Kish within the next two months, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday.
"Our specialists are currently working on the plan and the bourse will start working within the next two months," he told a regional conference in the Azeri capital of Baku.
Iranian officials have previously said the bourse would be a small pilot operation trading only two or three petrochemical products and it would start before March 2007, a delay from previous plans.
Western media and think-tanks have speculated that Iran's oil bourse could undermine the importance of the dollar by pricing the world's fourth biggest exports of crude in euros.
Mohammad Javad Asem-ipour, adviser to Iran's oil minister and head of the bourse project, has previously dismissed such suggestions as "propaganda" and rejected reports that the bourse was intended to rival exchanges being set up in Dubai and Qatar.
Asemipour has also said in the past that switching to crude sales would have to be phased in gradually and would depend on the success of the petrochemicals trading. And he added that operations could be gradually expanded to swaps with northern countries and then crude oil - starting with low quality oil, but declined to specify the timeframe.
He has also said Iran has no plans to set prices in euros and added that the Iranian bourse is not meant to challenge the IPE and Nymex exchanges, but simply intended to increase liquidity in Gulf energy trading.
Western media and think-tanks have speculated that Iran's oil bourse could undermine the importance of the dollar by pricing the world's fourth biggest exports of crude in euros.
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