EU chief Borrell says no Iran talks this week: Update 2

Updates with changes throughout

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said today there are no talks scheduled this week with Iranian officials about the nuclear deal, which he said was at "a critical point in time".

Oil market participants have watched the Iran nuclear diplomacy for clues on when at least 1.5mn b/d of Iranian crude might return to global markets. But the last two days provided contradictory signals on when negotiations between Iran and its international partners may resume. Borrell's statement pours cold water on Iranian parliament member Behroz Mohebbi's assertion on 17 October that the Brussels talks were scheduled for 21 October. And Borrell himself reversed course following a meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council — his statement that "Thursday is not going to be a meeting" — came after an earlier statement expressing optimism for "preparatory meetings in Brussels in the days to come".

A meeting in Tehran last week between EU deputy foreign affairs secretary Enrique Mora and Iran's recently-appointed deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri-Kani yielded merely a commitment from the Iranian government to meet again, this time in Brussels, for more discussions about a return to the negotiating table. But the US administration expressed concerns that Tehran may be using the pretext of a preparatory meeting to avoid the resumption of talks in Vienna. "We have been very clear that the destination we seek is in Vienna, not an intermediate step in Brussels," the State Department said today.

Indirect US-Iranian talks in Vienna in April-June, coordinated by the EU and mediated by France, Germany, the UK, Russia and China, failed to agree on a roadmap toward restoring the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal and lifting US sanctions.

The French foreign ministry, likewise, said it was not aware of any scheduled meetings between EU and Iranian diplomats but that, "in any case, these exchanges cannot replace the negotiations in Vienna with the other participants in the JCPOA and the US."

The US and Iran so far are negotiating in the form of public statements. The US objective is "a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA as negotiated in Vienna, and importantly, picking up in Vienna with a seventh round that takes up where the sixth round left off," the State Department said today.

Iran's president Ebrahim Raisi said today that Tehran was serious about engaging in "results-oriented" negotiations and that the US should show "serious intent" about readiness to lift sanctions.

Negotiators from the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the US have for months been urging Iran to return to the negotiations, which are aimed at bringing Iran and the US back into compliance with their commitments under the deal. Iran in 2019 began gradually ramping up its nuclear activities beyond the limits allowed under the JCPOA, in response to former president Donald Trump's May 2018 decision to pull the US out and reimpose sanctions on Tehran's economy.

Tehran has been seeking guarantees from the US that a future president would not walk away from any resurrected agreement in the way that Trump did — a request that US officials have said is unrealistic. Iran's foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has also said Tehran is looking for ways to verify the implementation of the JCPOA partners' commitments, particularly when it comes to lifting the sanctions that at one point removed nearly 2mn b/d of Iran's crude and condensate from the market.

Argus estimates that Iran's crude output was 2.47mn b/d in September, up from 1.97mn b/d in the final quarter of 2020, but still significantly down from the 3.81mn b/d it produced on average in the first quarter of 2018, before the US pulled out of the JCPOA.

By Nader Itayim, Ben Winkley and Haik Gugarats