ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Indian oil refiners will clear around 6 billion euros ($6.7 bln) of outstanding debt to Iran through Turkey's Halkbank within a short period, a senior Iranian economy official said on Wednesday.
India is one of the biggest buyers of Iranian crude and built up a payments backlog when Iran was under Western sanctions, with its refiners owing about $6.5 billion to Iran. They cleared around $770 million in euros through Halkbank to the National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) earlier in May.
"As per the instructions of the Central Bank of Iran, the local banks in India will transfer the money to Halkbank," Sadegh Akbari, Iran's general director for foreign economic relations, told reporters at a conference in Istanbul.
($1 = 0.8970 euros)
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Asli Kandemir; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by David Dolan)
