Currency Revaluation a Two-Year Process

Executing currency revaluation in Iran by removing one or more zeroes from the rial will require conditions that will not materialize for at least another two years, the governor of the Central Bank of Iran said.

“We have had no directives in the Cabinet to remove a zero from the currency and that is not on our agenda,” Valiollah Seif also said in a talk with Mehr News Agency’s website.

He elaborated that CBI has sent a bill to the government, which is still under review and questioned the official use of rial known to the people as toman (minus one zero).

“Therefore, it was stated in the bill that the monetary unit be changed to toman, which is not yet definitive and must be sent to the parliament. So we have had no plan to remove one zero,” he said.

In early December, while ratifying the CBI bill during a Cabinet meeting presided over by President Hassan Rouhani, the government approved changing Iran’s monetary unit from rial to toman, which meant lopping off one zero from the current national currency.

As a result of a multitude of sanctions imposed in the past, the CBI chief said the removal of zeroes from the national currency will only be possible when the stability of the inflation rate–currently in single digit after more than two decades–becomes a sure thing.

In view of the current agreeable trend of inflation rate and provided that it endures, “conditions required to remove a zero will be established in the next two to three years”.