Iran National Bank Director General said the government owes $230bn to the banks.
Abdulnosser Hemmati, whose remarks were published by the official Iranian ‘IRNA’ news agency, said, “To payback its debt to the National Bank, the government has allocated most of the companies to this bank and this entity has placed most of these companies up for auction.”
The state-run ‘Sharq’ daily wrote, “In 2007, the government owed around $51bn to a number of banks. But this figure increased to around $134bn in 2011.”