TEHRAN - Iranian Ambassador to London Hamid Baeidinejad said on Friday that there are many capacities for Iran and Britain to expand ties.

“In a situation in which it seems that the United States’ sanctions have impeded any kind of cooperation and interaction, there exists many capacities for economic interaction between Iran and Britain,” he said on the sidelines of a conference.

He attached great importance to small and medium-sized corporations.

“We have always focused on big corporation such as Shell Oil Company and British Petroleum, but the reality is that small and medium-sized corporations can be very profitable,” he said, according to a translation of his remarks.

During a speech at the conference, Norman Lamont, the UK special envoy for economic interaction with Iran, said that Britain will spare no effort in expanding economic relations with Iran.

Elsewhere, Lemont described U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to quit the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, as “catastrophic”.

However, he said that Britain will not follow Washington’s policy and seeks to expand economic interaction with Iran.

In May 2018, Trump abandoned the nuclear deal and returned the previous sanctions and imposed new harsh ones.

William J. Burns, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to former vice president Joe Biden, have said that the Trump administration’s decision to quit the  nuclear deal was “foolish”.

“The consequences of the Trump administration’s foolish decision to abandon that nuclear deal last year, with no evidence of Iranian noncompliance, were predictable — and predicted,” they wrote in an article published by The New York Times on October 14.

“We are now at a very dangerous point,” the article added.

It added, “The Trump administration, for its part, believed unrealistically that its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and saber-rattling would cause Iran to fold and accept America’s terms. But it failed to see that Iran has its own cards to play.”

It is also said in the article that the U.S. should remove sanctions against Iran and abandon its 12 preconditions to start talks with Tehran.

“The United States won’t get Iran to the table without some economic relief — either directly or through the European Union, as President Emmanuel Macron of France has suggested. The United States will also need to abandon as a precondition for progress the 12 demands that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out publicly last year,” they wrote.

It is also said, “The nuclear deal agreed to in 2015 was meant to be the beginning, not the end, of diplomacy with Iran.”

NA/PA