Cabinet spox.: Blanket judgements not genuine criticism of economic achievement

TEHRAN, Mar. 15 (MNA) – Mohammad Baqir Nowbakht has told a press conference IRIB’s measure to resort to street-level citizens for an economic assessment would be misleading the nation. Mr. Nowbakht was speaking in his last press conference in the fiscal year ending March 21, 2017. He provided the press with the government performance through figures which he believed mattered in concrete speech. “Since March 2016, over 24,000 small and medium-sized economic firms have received $4.5bn as asset in circulation; by March 11, government invested $6.4bn on construction projects; it also allocated $2.3bn for the construction center to support projects to the end of the term in August 2017,” Nowbakht detailed. “From fall of 2013 to fall of 2016, more than 2 million people were added to the number of active labor force seeking jobs; in fall of 2013, the number of employed was 20.9 million, which was 22.4 million three years later, which shows that within 3 years, roughly 1.5 million people found jobs,” he told the press. Nowbakht received criticism against the government with optimism; however, he denounced the ‘blanket criticism,’ which set aside government official figures, while itself provided little rationale that the case would be otherwise; “the current figures of economic growth is the product of complex interaction of other figures; merely rejecting such figures would achieve nothing in contributing the current economic conditions,” he lamented. On Rouhani’s letter to Kuwaiti emir, Nowbakht declined to comment further, claiming that he was not informed about the letter content; “Kuwaiti envoy, in his last visit to Tehran, conveyed a general message by the Persian Gulf countries including possibly Saudi Arabia, that they would welcome peace and security in the region, which President Rouhani’s letter had likely addressed in due course; the message suggested Arab state’s official requests for a general détente with Iran; both sides emphasized upon a common resolve to attain the stability much needed in the region,” he said. Nowbakht’s cutting edge of criticism hit what he believed was a ‘plot cabal’ in the IRIB to ‘destroy what the government has achieved in economic terms;’ “this is to mislead the nation; to ask ordinary citizens economic complex questions and then to draw conclusions based on their responses that the government failed to achieve economic success; we expect to see that IRIB, as it is called ‘national’, to address the issues through documentation and a genuine approach, setting aside efforts to distort the facts,” he concluded.