TEHRAN - The Crescent Petroleum Company has reached an agreement with Iran on exporting natural gas to the United Arab Emirates at the highest rate in the Persian Gulf region, five times the previously proposed price.

Iran and Crescent have been holding negotiations on gas prices for the past year.
The UAE company said that talks with the Iranian president’s Legal Affairs Office had positive results and they agreed to set the price of gas sold to Sharjah as the base in the two countries’ talks.
Crescent accepted the five-fold increase in the price of gas without any preconditions.
The UAE-based Crescent National Gas Corp. signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Iranian Oil Company in 2001 to import natural gas from Iran’s Salman field through a pipeline jointly built by Iran and Crescent.
According to the MOU, Iran was supposed to export 600 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to the UAE for 25 years starting in 2005.
As oil rallied in the following years, some officials in Iran called for a revision of the price formula. They blamed the price dispute for the delay in the export of gas to the UAE.
Crescent decided to seek international arbitration for what it called the failure of Iran’s state oil company to fulfill the terms of the gas export contract.
However, Iranian officials repeatedly stated that the NIOC-Crescent deal would only be implemented if it served Iran’s national interests.