Page 13 - MEOG Week 05

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Iran fumes at Ukraine
leaking air disaster audio
tape
Iran says it will no longer share information with Ukraine from the investigation into the shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner in response to a “strange move” that saw Kyiv leak a con dential recording in which a pilot is heard saying he believes he has seen a missile in the sky.
e row blew up on February 3 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying that the recording, played on Ukrainian TV the previous evening, showed that Iran knew immediately it had shot down the airliner, despite denying it for three days. however, the fact is that, reading between
the lines of what Iran has already said on the matter, its o cials have already acknowledged that there were regrettable shortcomings in this area that need to be reviewed and dealt with. e timing of Zelensky’s comments might have more to do with irritation on Kyiv’s part that Iran is not coming up with satisfactory compensation o ers for the relatives of the 176 people who perished in
the tragedy. Zelensky has said that Iran has o ered$80,000 per person, according to TSN, while the standard rate agreed internationally for those who die inair disasters is around $195,000 per person.
“ ey immediately o ered 80,000 dollars to each family of each deceased, but we did not agree to this,”Zelensky reportedly said. “It seems to me that this is not enough. When the deceased’s wife says that her husband was the only breadwinner, and she has no work, and the child needs to go to college—80 thousand dollars is not enough. Although, of course, human life is not measured by any money, but
we willpress for more payments.”
Ukraine is also unhappy that Iran has not
surrendered the black box ight recorders recovered from the crash site to Kyiv, despite conceding it does not have the necessary technology to quickly decrypt their data.
e leaked audio recording is of an Iranian pilot ying an aircra of Iran’s Aseman Airlines talking to the control tower in Tehran. he can be heard saying he saw “the light of a missile” in the sky before Ukrainian International Airways (UIA) ight PS752,
en route from Tehran to Kyiv on January 8, crashed in a reball in a eld outside the Iranian capital.
e recording “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane had been hit by a missile,” Zelenskiy said in a television interview.
A er denying blame for three days, Iran conceded its armed forces had shot the plane down. O cials said that the ring of two missiles at the civilian aircra was a mistake that occurred while the country was under high alert, given that hours earlier Iran
had red volleys of missiles at US targets at two bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US assassination of Iran’s top general ve days earlier. A communications breakdown meant that the gunner was unable to verify the target with superiors before making the decision to re, they said.
Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted the Iranian o cial in charge of accident investigations at Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, hassan Rezaifar, as hitting out at the releasing of the con dential recording. “ is action by the Ukrainians led to us not sharing any more evidence with them,” he said, adding that investigators from Ukraine had returned home.
O cials in Iran have partly attributed the delay in making a public admission that the Boeing 737 plane was shot down to the need to properly investigate the crash to rule out
other potential causes and assess whether foreign hacking could have been involved. bne
Saudi’s current account surplus narrows in Q3 2019
Saudi’s current account surplus narrows in Q3 2019 Saudi Arabia’s estimated current account surplus narrowed by 61% y/y to $9.84bn in the third quarter of 2019, re ecting a sharply lower trade surplus, according to the quarterly bulletin of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA).
Saudi Arabia’s estimated trade surplus in goods contracted to $29.14bn in the third quarter 2019 compared to $45.61bn in the same period the previous year as merchandise goods exports plunged to $62.95bn in the third quarter 2019 compared to $76.74bn in the third quarter 2018 on diving oil export revenues.
e world’s largest oil exporter’s
crude income shrank to $48.35bn in the third quarter 2019 from $61.58bn in the comparable period of the previous year. Overall imports rose to $33.81bn in the third quarter 2019 compared to $31.3bn in same period year before. Meanwhile, the services de cit narrowed moderately year-on-year from $11.93bn in the third quarter 2019 to $11.67bn in the third quarter of 2018.
Primary income, consisting mainly of capital gains and interest income from direct and portfolio investments, fell by $504mn
y/y to $1.44bn in the third quarter of 2019. Secondary income consisting mainly of workers’ remittances send to their families abroad also declined to $9.06bn in the third quarter 2019 compared to $9.87bn in the third quarter 2018.
Oman’s oil income up despite overall weaker GDP
e value added from Oman’s oil activities reached Omani Riyals (RO) 5.1 bn ($13.3 bn) at the end of the second quarter of 2019, up 2.1 per cent compared to RO 5 billion ($13 bn) at the end of the same period last year.
Rising crude prices contributed to the increase in the value add of oil activities, according to data issued by the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI).
Government statistics showed that the value add of natural gas increased by 5.6 per cent to reach RO 793.5 mn ($2.06 bn) for the same period, compared to RO 751.6 million ($1.95 bn) at the end of the same quarter of
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