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9.1.5 Tourism sector news
Hotel closure rate in Iran has hit 30% amid pandemic says federation
Some 30% of hotels in Iran have shut down since the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in the country in February, the Federation of Hotel Owners has said.
A collapse in bookings and lack of support provided to hotel owners to stay solvent saw many hotels either forced to close or mothball operations, it added.
“The industry has suffered Iranian rial 85tn ($304mn at the free market rate) in losses because of the pandemic and the radical decline in domestic and international travel,” federation representative Jamshid Hamzehzadeh was quoted as saying.
Some 70% of jobs have been lost in Iran’s hotel industry in the past year, with local tourism essentially non-existent on a short-term perspective, he added. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, 240,000 people were directly employed and 550,000 were indirectly employed in the Iranian tourism industry, industry estimates suggest.
9.1.6 TMT sector news
Twitter suspends accounts of Iran’s oil minister
Iran removes monopoly of Telecommunication s Infrastructure Company
Twitter has suspended the account of Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh.
An Iranian oil ministry official who asked to remain anonymous said that the suspension appeared to be linked to the sanctions that were in late October slapped on the minister by the US State Department as part of a move to step up action against Iran’s oil industry.
Twitter has not specified why it blocked Zanganeh’s account.
After being sanctioned, Zanganeh tweeted: “Imposition of sanctions on me and my colleagues is a passive reaction to the failure of Washington's policy of reducing [Iran's] crude oil exports to zero. The era of unilateralism is over in the world. Iran's oil industry will not be hamstrung."
He added that he owned no assets abroad, so he would not be impacted by sanctions.
In late September, Zanganeh openly admitted to forging documents as part of Iran’s effort to dodge US sanctions and sell oil on the grey market.
Zanganeh has previously said that Iran would return to the negotiating table with the US if Donald Trump was ousted from power.
Tehran will be hoping to see a very different policy towards Iran from the Joe Biden administration to that pursued by the Trump administration. Biden has said the US could return to the nuclear deal if Iran agreed to conditions including abiding in full with the accord.
Iran’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, has announced a telecoms infrastructure shake-up involving the lifting of the monopoly held by the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company (TIC), CITNA reported on November 11.
TIC has historically been the sole provider of telecommunication infrastructure to all private and public operators in Iran. Prior to the announcement, TIC had come under increasing criticism for its lax attitude to investment in fibre broadband and maintenance of Iran’s ageing telecoms network. TIC was also the sole company to turn to for all international gateways and IP capacity and connectivity services in the country.
Azari Jahromi said: "With this lifting of the monopoly, the company has been
45 IRAN Country Report December 2020 www.intellinews.com
