Foreign Investments in Iran Down By About %100 This Year

 

Tehran, January 18, 2010 (Hamsayeh.Net) - Iranian banking officials say the level of foreign investments in Iran has tumbled markedly in the current Iranian year compared to previous years.

 

Chairman of the Commerce Commission of Tehran’s Chamber of Commerce, Mohsen Bahrami-A-Aqdas told Iranian ILNA news agency, at the joint meeting of the Export and Trade Bureaus of Iran and the Trade Bureau of Tehran Chamber, that foreign investments were down almost 100 percent from last year.

 

The banking expert said the envisioned developmental plans required at least 10 percent increase in foreign investments, but due to current circumstances all those proposed plans have to be postponed until the government’s planners can create a more investors friendly atmosphere. However, given the extraordinary high levels of mismanagements in all sectors of the country’s day-to-day affairs, it would be certainly impossible to change the current atmosphere in short order.

 

At this moment almost all of Iran’s industrial and services sectors function with minimum capacity. Several years ago, the Ahmadinejad government proposed an ambitious privatization plan, but the plan has fallen into doldrums due to lack of clear planning.

 

According to Bahrami-a-Aqdas out of 357 state-owned companies eligible for privatization program, only 28 of them have so far turned into private entities during the 5^th developmental plan. He admitted that there’s no clear solution to resolve this issue.