Iran is ready to restart
exporting its oil to France and the UK if they sign
long-term supply deals, and will also continue delivering crude to
Italy's Eni
SpA, Tehran's oil chief said Wednesday, as the country climbed down from
threats that have pushed oil prices to a nine-month high.
According to Iran's
oil
ministry Website Shana, Ahmed Ghalebani, head of the National Iranian
Oil
Co., said "we announced that oil will not be delivered to France and
Britain" but if "companies [including Total SA and BP PLC] want to
buy oil from Iran,
it can be in the form of long-term contract and without any
preconditions."
The chief United Nations nuclear inspector probing Iran's
alleged
atomic weapons drive said Wednesday negotiations have reached an
impasse following a high-stakes two-day visit to the Islamic republic.
"We tried to reach agreement on a way forward to resolve all the
outstanding issues...We approached this trip in a constructive spirit.
Unfortunately
we could not get agreement," Herman Nackaerts told reporters at Vienna
airport.
"We could not get access (to the Parchin military site), we could not
formalize the way forward. We will now report to the (IAEA) director
general
and later to the board of governors. Then we will have to see what are
the next
steps."
The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement in the early
hours
of Wednesday that "intensive efforts" to reach a deal on a document
covering the way forward had failed.
The team requested access both during this visit and during a first trip
in
late January to Parchin, near Tehran, where it believes explosives
testing was
carried out, but Iran
"did not grant permission," the IAEA said.
"It is disappointing that Iran
did not accept our request to visit Parchin during the first or second
meetings,"
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in the statement.
Iran's
envoy
to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was quoted by the Iranian news
agency
ISNA as saying the talks "would continue" but neither he nor the IAEA
said whether another visit was planned.
And following the visit, Iran's
supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei insisted that the regime in Tehran was
not seeking nuclear weapons.
"We are not after an atomic weapon. We want to break the supremacy (of
the
world powers) that relies on nuclear weapons. God willing, the nation
will
reach this goal," he told a meeting with Iranian nuclear scientists,
according to an official government statement.
The high-ranking IAEA team led by Nackaerts hoped to clarify issues
raised in a
watershed November report from the agency that substantially raised
suspicions
that Iran
had done work developing nuclear weapons.
The trip was also seen as an important precursor to a possible
resumption of
talks between Iran
and the P5+1 powers, the U.S., China, Russia, France, UK, and Germany,
which
broke down in Turkey 13 months ago.
Since the report's publication, the U.S. and the European Union have
ramped up
sanctions on Iran's
oil
sector, and speculation has grown that Iran's
arch
rival Israel might launch air strikes.
Iran,
whose economy has been hit hard by the recent ramping up of sanctions,
has
consistently denied wanting nuclear weapons, insisting its programme,
including
the enrichment of uranium, is for peaceful purposes.
The UN Security Council has imposed four rounds of sanctions on Iran
because of its repeated failure to declare nuclear sites and materials
to the
IAEA.