In an interview with Fars News Agency on Sunday, Ali Saleh-Abadi said the use of Iranian and Russian national currencies, rial and ruble respectively, was one of the priorities on the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi’s economic agenda.
Iran and Russia have already switched to their national currencies in a number of mutually-agreed markets and the two sides are making efforts to extend the mechanism to other trade fields as well, the senior official added.
He said that Tehran and Moscow had long been seeking to create a mechanism to replace the US dollar with their own national currencies as part of a joint de-dollarization agenda, regardless of the tough economic sanctions in place against the two nations.
Earlier, Mehdi Safari, the Iranian deputy foreign minister for economic diplomacy, had told the Russian Sputnik News Agency that two countries needed to design a banking system similar to SWIFT in order to de-dollarize their exchanges.
