TEHRAN (IRNA) -- Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh in a letter to Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi called for removal of the seal on the southern Mansouri oil and gas installations, the press reported here on Tuesday.

The Persian-language newspaper `Kar-o Karegar' quoted Zanganeh as stressing in his letter that the lands on which the installations are located virtually belonged to the Department of Natural Resources, and had nothing to do with adjacent farming lands.

He expressed regret that the court ordering the seal of the installations had repeatedly overlooked this fact in several proceedings into the case.

"Regardless the issue of ownership, the Mansouri installations every day processes over 100,000 barrels of crude oil as well as recovered natural gas from Khuzestan oilfields and pumps them into the country's export terminals," Zanganeh said.

The press reported on Thursday that a local court in the southwestern province of Khuzestan last Wednesday ordered that Mansouri oilfield located over the lands disputed between local farmers and the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) be sealed.

The order was based on a similar ruling last year by Bench 7 of Ahvaz Court regarding the lands on which the Mansouri installations are established, in Khavisseh district, 75 kilometers from Ahvaz.

The farmers had lodged a complaint against NIOC with Ahvaz Court late last year, and the court had accordingly ordered the seal of the Mansouri oilfield for seven months.

NIOC, however, had succeeded in removing the seal last March. The company had tried to buy the disputed lands from the farmers at 10 billion rials. However, the farmers refuse to sell the lands or submit the ownership documents to the company.

Meanwhile, Gholam-Reza Shirali, the director of Legal Affairs Department of the National Southern Oil-Rich Company, told the press that the court ruling had come into effect from Saturday morning.

Shirali said that the closure of the Mansouri oilfield would cut Iran's national revenues by 2.5 million dollars a day.

He had told the press last Thursday that the disputed lands belong to the Natural Resources Department, stressing that NIOC has finalized the talks for buying the lands from the department.

Shirali had said that the landlords of an area adjacent to the Mansouri oilfields have lodged their ownership claim over the lands, and that they had turned down an NIOC offer of 10 billion rials to buy the lands.