An Iranian airline says it is in negotiations with Boeing for the purchase of 20 passenger planes even as US President Donald Trump’s threats to kill a nuclear deal this month have put Iran’s aviation contracts in doubt.

Qeshm Air CEO Mahmoud Shekarabi was quoted as saying that his company planned to buy 10 Boeing 737 MAX and 10 Boeing 737 Next Generation planes from the American planemaker.

“Memoranda of understanding have been signed in this regard,” he said on the sidelines of the opening of national flag carrier Iran Air’s Catering in Tehran on Monday, Tasnim news agency reported.

Qeshm Air is also negotiating an order for 15 Airbus A320 and A319 jets from the European manufacturer and another 10 planes from Canada’s Bombardier, he said.

“These negotiations are underway, but there are a number of problems,” Shekarabi said without elaboration.

The company may also consider buying Sukhoi Superjet 100s from Russia but “we do not currently have any plans for it,” he added.

Last week, two other Iranian airlines said they had signed deals for the purchase of 40 short-haul passenger aircraft from the Russian company.

The purchases were made by Aseman Airlines and Iran Air Tours and the related documents were signed on the sidelines of Eurasia Airshow 2018 in Turkey’s Anatolia.

Aseman signed a final deal last June to buy 30 Boeing 737 MAX jets in Iran’s first new business with the US planemaker since Trump took office vowing to take a tougher stance toward the country.

Iranian domestic carrier Zagros Airlines also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to buy 20 Airbus A320neo jets and eight A330neo aircraft, while privatized Iran Airtour signed an MoU for 45 A320neos.

The biggest orders, however, were made by Iran Air which has agreed to buy 80 aircraft from Boeing and 100 from Airbus in addition to 20 from Franco-Italian ATR company.

The deals were made possible after US-led sanctions against Iran were lifted in early 2016 under a nuclear agreement between the Islamic Republic and other countries.

Last year, Iran Air received three brand-new Airbus jets and eight new ATR turboprops. According to an official, Iran should receive 14 new passenger aircraft this year from Airbus, Boeing and ATR planemakers.

However, there are questions of what would happen to the deals if Trump went ahead with his threat to withdrew the US from the nuclear agreement on May 12 and whether the US Treasury would extend licenses for sales of the parts which are built in the United States.

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Iran will receive 2 more ATR airplanes on Friday, bringing the number of ATR72 delivered to Iran by the western company to 8, a source in Iran Air told Mehr News Agency on Friday.

Iran Air will take delivery of two ATR 72-600s at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport on Friday.

Two ATR72-600 aircrafts will be shipped into Homa Airlines by Iranian pilots after the grand tests in French city of Toulouse.

Iran Air CEO is scheduled to travel to France on Tuesday, to finalize necessary documents regarding the two airplanes.

Iran is gradually receiving the passenger planes purchased from Airbus, ATR , and Boeing, following the implementation of the JCPOA.

Back in April 2017, Iran Air signed a contract with ATR to buy 20 planes from turboprop maker ATR.

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Bpifrance, the country’s state investment bank, will finance investment projects of French companies in Iran from 2018, granting up to 500 million euros ($598 million) in annual credits, its CEO said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.

“Excluding a force majeure case, we will be on their side in early 2018. We are the only French bank that can do it without risking US sanctions for a possible breach of remaining embargo rules,” Nicolas Dufourcq told Le Journal du Dimanche, Reuters reported.

The deal Iran struck in 2015 with six major powers lifted many sanctions against the country in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear activities and paved the way for international business deals.

FILE PHOTO: The logo of French Public Investment Bank (BPI) is seen on the BPI headquarters at Maisons-Alfort near Paris March 16, 2015. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo

But many banks have stayed away for fear of inadvertently breaking remaining US sanctions, which could lead to huge fines.

Because the BPI has no operations abroad, notably in the United States, it is not exposed to possible fines for US sanctions breaches.

US President Donald Trump has created new uncertainties over the US stance towards the Iran nuclear agreement. Trump told reporters this week that he had made a decision on what to do about the agreement but would not say what he had decided.

Several Franco-Iranian deals were announced during Iran President Hassan Rouhani’s official visit to Paris in January last year. These included a joint venture between carmakers PSA Peugeot Citroen (PEUP.PA) and Iran Khodro as well as plans for Iran to buy Airbus (AIR.PA) aircraft to update its ageing fleet.

There were also deals in the oil, shipping, health, agriculture and water sectors.

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Iran announced that several major European and Asian financiers have announced their readiness to fund the purchases of planes from global aviation giants Airbus and Boeing.

Deputy Minister of Roads and Urban Development for International Affairs Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan was quoted by Press TV as saying that nine financial institutions from Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, China and Japan had already approached Iran to fund the purchases.

He did not disclose the names of the interested financers.

Nevertheless, he underlined that arrangements to hold a tender to choose the financier for the purchases were underway, adding that tender documents would be sent out to potential bidders within a month.

Last week, he was quoted by THE media as saying that Britain’s key export credit agency — UK Export Finance (UKEF) — had informed Iran’s Ministry of Roads and Urban Development that it was ready to provide funding for all of Iran’s purchases from Boeing and Airbus.

He stressed that Iran wanted to have an open hand in choosing the best financiers and that a tender to this effect would be held soon.

“Iran Air is preparing the tender documents so that they would be sent to all credible financiers worldwide,” Fakhrieh Kashan told IRNA.

“We are in conditions that permit us to choose our desired financiers in a competitive atmosphere that a tender creates.”

Also, Iran’s media last October quoted an unidentified government official as saying that Boeing had sealed a deal with an American bank to provide financing for Iran’s purchase of airliners in cooperation with a Japanese bank.

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Iran’s Aseman Airlines on Tuesday signed a deal to purchase dozens of passenger planes from US aviation giant Boeing.

Under the agreement, the airlines will buy 30 Boeing 737 MAX airplanes worth $3 billion. The deal also gives Aseman the right to purchase another 30 of the Boeing’s twinjet narrow-body passenger planes.

IRNA said that representatives of Aseman and Boeing signed the agreement in Tehran covering as many as 60 jets, including options, after a year of negotiations.

Owned by Iran’s civil service pension foundation but managed as a private company, Aseman is Iran’s third largest airline by active fleet size, according to the CAPA consultancy.

Tehran-based Aseman Airlines has a fleet of 36 planes – half of them the 105-seat Dutch Fokker 100s. it operates them on flights to 40 domestic and 13 international destinations, according to its website. However, it was banned from flying into the European Union over safety concerns in December.

Its three Boeing 727-200s are almost as old as the 1979 Islamic Revolution, having made their first flight in 1980.

Boeing described the deal as a “memorandum of agreement,” a type of transaction that falls short of a binding contract and is subject to government approvals.

The Aseman deal still has to be approved by the US government. Boeing said it negotiated the agreement under government authorizations.

If completed, the main part of the deal for 30 jets would be worth $3.4 billion at list prices, though airlines typically win discounts of around 50 percent for large deals.

In the statement on the latest deal, Boeing cited US Department of Commerce data suggesting an “aerospace sale of this magnitude creates or sustains approximately 18,000 jobs in the United States”.

Deliveries to Aseman would start in 2022.

“Boeing continues to follow the lead of the US government with regards to working with Iran’s airlines and any and all contracts with Iran’s airlines are contingent upon US government approval,” Boeing said.

Boeing 737 MAX planes – that would enter service in the second half of 2017 – have a passenger capacity of 130 people and are specifically adequate for domestic and regional flights.

The planes that Aseman Airlines has purchased from Boeing would increase the company’s passenger transportation capacity to above 8,000 seats, Aseman emphasized.

Even before the latest Boeing deal, Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization said plane purchases would create 20,000 direct jobs, and thousands more indirectly.

“Currently, 500-700 co-pilots are unemployed in Iran,” CAO official Mohammad Reza Kazemipour said on Monday, adding that the new fleets would bring “tens of billions of dollars in revenues for Iran”.

The memorandum of understanding is the second big agreement Boeing has reached with Iranian airlines since sanctions were eased in January 2016 after an international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

Boeing is to provide 50 planes of the same type to Iran’s flag-carrier airline Iran Air through a similar agreement. The overall value of Iran Air’s order that also involves 30 long-range wide-body 777 aircraft is estimated to be $16.6 billion.

Iran Air said in December 2016 that Boeing would start to deliver the planes in 2018 and the deliveries would be completed within 10 years.

Iran has already received the first three of a total of 100 Airbus planes that it has purchased from the European company through an agreement worth around $18 billion. More deliveries are expected to take place in the coming months.

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France‘s foreign minister travels to Iran on Monday, seeking to reaffirm Europe’s commitment to the nuclear deal that US President Donald Trump has threatened to annul.

The deal struck in 2015 with three European countries, Russia, China and the United States gave Iran relief from a range of sanctions, allowing it to strike major business deals with Europe for the first time in years, Reuters reported.

After taking one of the hardest lines in the negotiations, France has been quick to restore trade ties. Plane maker Airbus, oil major Total and automobile manufacturers Peugeot and Renault have all signed deals.

Some 50 French firms will take part in a Franco-Iranian economic forum on Tuesday at which more will be signed.

“Jean-Marc Ayrault is going to underline the importance that all sides which backed the deal strictly respect their commitments,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal told a daily briefing.

Trump has called the deal, which imposes limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, “the worst deal ever negotiated” threatening to annul it or seek a better agreement.

However, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently said Washington cannot unilaterally decide to abrogate the agreement as it is an “international agreement,” and not a bilateral one between Iran and the US.

Earlier this month and on the anniversary of the deal’s implementation, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said if Trump went ahead with acting on the threat, Iran would burn the agreement.

The EU says it is in full agreement with China and Russia over the need to keep the nuclear deal alive.

Despite the sanction relief, including on banking restrictions, Iran continues to struggle to access Western finance, partly due to banks’ fears about penalties related to remaining US sanctions.

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Russia‘s aviation giant Sukhoi signed a preliminary agreement with Iran to sell Superjet 100 planes.

According to Interfax news agency, the agreement, which was signed with an unnamed Iranian company, enables both sides to study the projected sales.

The news agency quoted an unnamed Russia aviation official as confirming the development. The official added, however, that the agreement was still not binding.

Russia’s aviation giant Sukhoi signed a preliminary agreement with Iran to sell Superjet 100 planes.

Head of Iran’s Aseman Airlines Hossein Alaei had earlier said his company was negotiating with Sukhoi as well as several other leading global plane makers to renovate its fleet.

He added that Sukhoi had conducted trial flights of Superjet 100 last week in Tehran, which, he said, was carried out at the invitation of Aseman Airlines.

Last Sunday, an Iranian aviation official said that the country’s airlines were planning to open plane purchase talks with Sukhoi.

Maqsoud Asadi-Samani from Iran‘s Aviation Companies Association was quoted as saying that Iranian airlines were specifically considering the company’s Superjet 100 (SSJ100) aircraft.

Sukhoi Superjet 100 is a modern fly-by-wire twin-engine regional jet with up to 108 passenger seats. With development initiated in 2000, the airliner was designed and spearheaded by Sukhoi — a division of the Russian civil aerospace company (UAC) — in cooperation with several foreign partners, according to Mehr News Agency.

Designed to compete internationally with its An-148, Embraer E-Jet and Bombardier CSeries counterparts, the Superjet 100 claims substantially lower operating costs

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Boeing has agreed to provide financing for the first six planes it sells to Iran, Iran Air chief Executive Farhad Parvaresh was quoted as saying by Fars news agency on Tuesday.

Parvaresh added that IranAir will pay 15 percent of prices of the passenger jet from Iran’s development fund./ (Source: Reuters)

Iran buy 80 airplanes from Boeing

Iran Air CEO Farhad Parvaresh said the Iranian national carrier has signed into an agreement with Boeing aircraft manufacturing company to purchase 80 airplanes.

Managing Director of Iran’s national carrier, Iran Air (Homa), Farhad Parvaresh made the remarks on the sidelines of agreement signing ceremony today in Tehran between Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran Air) and directors of Boeing Company at the presence of Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Abbas Ahmad Akhundi.

Parvaresh underlined that 50 of the aircraft will be of Boeing 737 model which is a short- to medium-range twinjet narrow-body airliner.

“The other 30 airplanes will be Boeing 777 long-range wide-body twin-engine jet airliners,” highlighted the official noting that deliveries will be made to Iran Air over a ten-year time span.

Representative of Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems, said the deal with Iran was finalized with approval of the US government.

The official, while stressing that the contract was worth 16.6 billion dollars, said Boeing had sealed the final agreement to sell 80 commercial aircraft to Iran upon receiving necessary permits from the goverment of the US.

The Boeing official recalled that the final document signed today followed the Memorandum of Understanding inked earlier in June; “we are pleased that Boeing has one more resumed cooperation with Iran,” he observed.

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Iran Air CEO Farhad Parvaresh said the Iranian national carrier has signed into an agreement with Boeing aircraft manufacturing company to purchase 80 airplanes.

Managing Director of Iran’s national carrier, Iran Air (Homa), Farhad Parvaresh made the remarks on the sidelines of agreement signing ceremony today in Tehran between Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran Air) and directors of Boeing Company at the presence of Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Abbas Ahmad Akhundi.

Parvaresh underlined that 50 of the aircraft will be of Boeing 737 model which is a short- to medium-range twinjet narrow-body airliner.

“The other 30 airplanes will be Boeing 777 long-range wide-body twin-engine jet airliners,” highlighted the official noting that deliveries will be made to Iran Air over a ten-year time span.

Representative of Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems, said the deal with Iran was finalized with approval of the US government.

The official, while stressing that the contract was worth 16.6 billion dollars, said Boeing had sealed the final agreement to sell 80 commercial aircraft to Iran upon receiving necessary permits from the goverment of the US.

The Boeing official recalled that the final document signed today followed the Memorandum of Understanding inked earlier in June; “we are pleased that Boeing has one more resumed cooperation with Iran,” he observed.

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France’s imports from Iran in the first nine months of 2016 show a staggering 34-fold rise compared to the corresponding period last year, thanks to resumption of oil imports after coming into force of the Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Iran-France trade has tripled since implementation of the nuclear agreement in January, according to figures from EU’s statistical office Eurostat.

Iran has experienced a positive balance of €383 million in trade with France during the nine-month period, after resumption of crude exports to Europe’s biggest purchaser of Iranian oil, Tasnim News Agency reported.

France’s imports from Iran in January-September 2016 stood at €842 million, more than 34 times greater than the same period in 2015.

The European country’s imports from Iran averaged €34.4 million from 2014 until 2016, and reached €229 million in August 2016.

Cooperation between Iranian and French companies has increased in recent months.

In November, France’s Total signed a deal with Iran to further develop its part of the world’s largest gas field, becoming the first western energy company to sign a major deal with Tehran since the lifting of international sanctions earlier this year.

Total confirmed that it had signed a heads of agreement with National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) for the Phase 11 development of South Pars in the Persian Gulf, which extends into Qatari waters where it is known as the North Field.

The French company has already played a key role in Iran’s energy industry, including the development of phases 2 and 3 of South Pars in the 2000s, before pulling out of the country after international sanctions were imposed in 2010.

Also, French carmaker Peugeot-Citroen (PSA) announced in June its return to Iran under a €400m joint venture with its old partner Iran Khodro in Tehran.

The first cars produced under the PSA venture are set to be sold in February, with the aim of producing 200,000 vehicles a year by 2018.

PSA is the first Western carmaker to announce a return to Iran since many economic sanctions were lifted in January.

Another French carmaker, Renault, also reached a deal with Iran’s government in September to open a plant making at least 150,000 vehicles a year.

The French carmaker announced the deal with the Industrial Development & Renovation Organization of Iran, during the Paris auto show.

Iran has also signed a major contract with European aviation giant, Airbus, worth about $27 billion to buy 118 planes within few months. The contract was signed during the visit to France by Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani./Iran Daily

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