TEHRAN – The governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has said the country’s banking system paid 44 trillion rials (about $1.047 billion) of facilities to the production units affected by the coronavirus outbreak, over the past 45 days.

Abdolnasser Hemmati has called on the banks to accelerate the process of assessing applicants for loan allocations to provide more production units with their required facilities in the face of the economic problems created by the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Back in March, the CBI governor had announced that the banking system was going to offer low-interest-rate facilities to people and production units to compensate for the financial damages resulted from the coronavirus outbreak.

To provide the mentioned facilities the CBI asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for $5 billion in emergency loans to help the country contain the spreading virus and mitigate its effects on the economy, however, under the U.S. influence, the IMF did not grant the country the needed help.

Later, the government announced the allocation of 1,000 trillion rails (about $24 billion at the official rate of 42,000 rials) of facilities to help alleviate the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the national economy.

"We allocated the sum in addition to the next year's budget to prevent huge losses and to be able to go on more conveniently," President Hassan Rouhani said in late March.

Rouhani went on saying that 520 trillion rials (about $12.3 billion) was also going to be offered in the form of loans to 10 prioritized business and production categories which have been affected the most from the coronavirus outbreak.

The government had previously announced that about 230 trillion rials ($5.4 billion as per official exchange rate) would be offered as loans with 12-percent interest rates to small and medium enterprises and low-income households.

EF/MA