Iran oil exports to China hit new record high, report shows

A Western media outlet has reported that the exports of crude oil from Iran to China have increased to new record highs despite the touphened US sanctions.

News ID: 2002268

Traders are cited by Reuters as saying that the increase is related to the resurging Chinese imports of Indonesia's oil point to rebranded Iranian crude.

China is importing unusually large quantities of crude oil from Indonesia, a trend traders say is a way to mask shipments of sanctioned Iranian crude trans-shipped in waters off Malaysia amid greater scrutiny of cargoes originating from Malaysia.

Declaring Iranian oil as Malaysian has long been a tactic of traders selling to China, the largest buyer of the US-sanctioned crude, market participants say, according to the Reuters report.

Observers view the latest figures as evidence of both Tehran’s ability to bypass the tough sanctions.

Earlier this month, TankerTrackers announced that the Iranian oil exports to China had hit a new record high since May 2018 when the United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal known as the JCPOA and re-imposition of the sanctions.

"Over the past 4 weeks, Iran has exported nearly 2.3 million barrels of crude oil per day. These are numbers we haven't seen since the early half of 2018," TankerTrackers company, an independent online service that tracks and reports shipments of crude oil in several geographical and geopolitical points of interest," TankerTrackers reported in a post on its X account on November 9./mehr