Sanctions relief worth up to $40 billion to Iran -Israel

        
A sanctions relief package offered to Iran as part of nuclear negotiations could be worth up to $40 billion to Tehran, or 40 percent of the impact of the sanctions, an Israeli cabinet minister said on Wednesday.
 
Israel is strongly opposed to a package of sanctions relief, which the United States says will be limited and reversible, offered to Iran by global powers at talks in return for constraints on Tehran's nuclear program.
   
Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said Israel believed the sanctions put in place by the United States and European Union last year cost Iran's economy around $100 billion per year, or nearly a quarter of its output.
   
"The sanctions relief directly will reduce between 15 to 20 billion dollars out of this amount," Steinitz said on Wednesday at an English-language event hosted by the Jerusalem Press Club.
   
The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China have offered at talks to reduce sanctions in return for curbs to Iran's nuclear program, which Western countries suspect is part of an effort to develop a nuclear bomb but Tehran says is peaceful.
   
The talks broke up without a deal on Saturday, but are scheduled to resume on Nov. 20 and the sides say they are optimistic that progress can be made.
  
This comes as the head of the U.N. nuclear agency said on Wednesday he saw no "radical" change in Iran's nuclear program in the past three months, broadly covering the period since relative moderate Hassan Rouhani became president.          

Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Reuters in an interview that the Islamic state was continuing its most sensitive nuclear activity, enrichment of uranium to a fissile concentration of 20 percent.              

Amano also said Iran still has "quite a lot to do" in order to complete the Arak research reactor, a plant which is of deep concern to the West as it can produce potential bomb material once it is operating. Iran says its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.            

Reactions:

French President Francois Hollande and U.S. counterpart Barack Obama are both determined to obtain guarantees from Iran that it will not seek to develop a nuclear weapon, the French president's office said on Wednesday.
   
"The two heads of state expressed their common will to obtain from Iran guarantees that it is definitively abandoning its military nuclear program," Hollande's office said in a statement after the two spoke on the telephone. Tehran has long said its program is simply aimed at generating energy.


REUTERS