By MICHAEL EBOH with Agency Report

Iran has suspended, by at least four months, its plan to issue $10 billion in bonds for the finance of energy projects.

According to reports the bonds sales had been included as a funding plan in a draft budget presented by the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on February 27.

The reports noted that the budget plan has yet to be approved by parliament and given that the permit handed to state-run National Iranian Oil Company for issuing the bonds is only valid for this Iranian year the plan is unlikely to be validated before July.

The news of the suspension follows an announcement earlier this week that a group of private companies that export Iranian crude, helping the government bypass international trade and financial sanctions, has stopped its activity.

Iran is under U.S. and European Union sanctions over its nuclear program and the measures have limited the Persian Gulf country’s oil exports and complicated the repatriation of cash from oil sales. EU countries have halted oil imports from the Islamic republic since July and additional U.S. measures that came into force last month are further restricting the government’s access to foreign currencies.

The private sector has sold no oil in the past two months, Hassan Khosrojerdi, head of the Iranian Oil, Gas & Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Association said in a separate Mehr report on March 5.

He cited managerial obstacles inside NIOC. The association of Iranian oil-product exporters has signed an agreement with Iran’s central bank and Oil Ministry to ship as much as 500,000 barrels a day, Khosrojerdi had said in July.

Given complications created by sanctions “regulations should have been simplified to allow for the private sector to export the oil,” Hamid Hosseini, a member of the exporters’ association’s board of director said in the same Mehr report. NIOC “was unwilling to show any leniency for the private sector to cooperate,” he said.