Iran stops oil shipments to UK and France ahead of sanctions

A statement posted on the ministry’s website gave no other details, but it follows a flurry of contradictory signals by Iran about a backlash against the EU for imposing a boycott on Iranian oil beginning in July.

The 27-nation EU accounts for about 18 per cent of Iran’s oil exports.

The move came after Foreign Secretary William Hague warned Israel that military action against Iran would not be “a wise thing”.

Amid rumours the Israeli government is considering strikes against Iran within months, Mr Hague insisted economic sanctions and negotiations had to be given “a real chance” to convince Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

In an interview with BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show, the Foreign Secretary repeated his warning that a nuclear-armed Iran would result in another cold war in the Middle East.

“They would either be attacked and there would be a war, or there would be a cold war in which Iran for the long term would be subject to these very intense economic sanctions and they would find that other nations in their region developed nuclear weapons,” he said.

Iranian Ministry spokesman Ali Reza Nikzad-Rahbar said the suspension of oil shipments posed no problems for Iran.

“We have our own customers and replaced British and French companies with other firms,” he was quoted as saying by the IRNA state news agency.

Last week, state media said Iran was planning to cut off oil exports to six EU nations, including France, but later reports said the nations were only told that Iran has no problem finding replacement customers for the European shipments.

The EU sanctions, imposed last month, were part of Western efforts to target Iran’s critical oil sector in attempts to rein in Tehran’s nuclear programme

Earlier diplomats said Iran was poised to greatly expand uranium enrichment at a fortified underground bunker to a point that would boost how quickly it could make nuclear warheads.

They said Tehran had put finishing touches for the installation of thousands of new-generation centrifuges at the cavernous bunker – machines that can produce enriched uranium much more quickly and efficiently than its present machines.

While saying that the electrical circuitry, piping and supporting equipment for the new centrifuges was now in place, the diplomats emphasised that Tehran had not started installing the new machines at its Fordo facility and could not say whether it was planning to.

Fordo could be used to make fissile warhead material even without such an upgrade, the diplomats said.

They said that although older than Iran’s new generation machines, the centrifuges now operating there can be reconfigured within days to make such material because they already are enriching to 20 per cent – a level that can be boosted quickly to weapons-grade quality.

In contrast, Iran’s older enrichment site at Natanz is producing uranium at 3.4 per cent, a level normally used to power reactors. While that too could be turned into weapons-grade uranium, reassembling from low to weapons-grade production is complex, and retooling the thousands of centrifuges at Natanz would probably take weeks.

The diplomats’ comments come as International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are due to visit Tehran in another attempt to break more than three years of Iranian stonewalling about the nuclear claims.