No Interest Paid on State Accounts

The accounts of Iranian government entities transferred to the Central Bank of Iran as part of a new plan will receive no interest, announced a deputy economy minister.

In August, the government announced measures to transfer its accounts from agent banks to the Central Bank of Iran in cooperation with the Treasury. 

The measures make up the Electronic Treasury scheme that aims to return the accounts from government and private-owned agent banks to the Treasury.  

A few months passed and on Friday, Treasury director at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, Mohsen Borzouzadeh, announced that the plan has drastically reduced the number of government accounts from the previous 250,000 accounts to 69,000.

Borzouzadeh promised that the number of accounts will be further reduced to 45,000 by the end of the current fiscal year in March, which number, he said, is at the global standard level and results from the fact that there are 450 executive entities and each entity (which also includes their subsets) can only have 10 accounts.

Deputy Economy Minister Saeed Mirshojaeian elaborated on the plan and told Mehr News Agency that these are current accounts and no interest applies to them.

Mirshojaeian further said that although the process might prove “painful” for the government and banks because the government used to receive interest on its accounts at the banks, “this is a path that must be taken under the strict rule of the law”.