Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei advised the government last July not to rely on European efforts to protect Tehran against US sanctions, months after Washington withdrew from a nuclear deal with Iran and reposed penalties.
The release of Imam Khamenei’s speech nine months after his meeting with the cabinet, showed that the Leader was not optimistic about the efforts.
“You should not wait for anything or anyone. One day, we made the economy of the country dependent on the JCPOA [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]. The JCPOA failed to eliminate our economic problems and to help us in a noticeable way,” the Leader said last July, as quoted by his official website on Monday.
“The result was that the people became “conditional” towards the JCPOA so much so that when that dude [Donald Trump] announced that he wanted to get out of the deal, we experienced turbulences in our market.”
As for the Europeans, they would naturally say they are protecting Iranian interests with their package “but (the Iranian government) should not make this a main issue,” Imam Khamenei said.
The Leader said that the deal did not resolve “any of economic problems” of Iran, and predicted that the mechanism proposed by Europeans to shield business with Iran against the U.S. sanctions would not also be a solution to economic hardship.
“(The Europeans) are bad. They are really bad. I have a lot to say about the Europeans; not because of their current policies, but their mischievous nature in the last few centuries.”
Source: Iranian media
