Claim on social media that Pakistan imports oil from Iran is fake
Communications Executive of PSO stated, "Pakistan has no petroleum imports from Iran".
LAHORE (AFP) – News going viral on social media claiming that Iran has suspended oil supplies to Pakistan as a result of billions of dollars worth of outstanding payments is fake as Pakistan State Oil company stated that the country doesn’t import oil from Iran.
The fake news has been shared more than seven hundred times on Facebook and Twitter, and published on social media on August 18, 2019.
Screenshot of the fake news posted below:
The Hindi text reads, “Iran suspended diesel and petrol supplies to Pakistan. They will only resume the supply once Pakistan pays off approximately 21 billion dollars of the outstanding amount. And these beggars eager for Kashmir.”
Naila Erum, Communications Executive of PSO Company Ltd, told AFP, “Pakistan has no petroleum imports from Iran”.
“The last time Diesel was imported by Pakistan was a meager quantity of 1,000 tonnes in 2009,” Shankar Laterja, an oil analyst at Pakistan’s Topline Securities, told AFP on phone.
An article published here by Iran’s Mehr news agency on May 2, 2019, reports that “Iran does not export its oil and gas to Pakistan.”
Information services firm CEIC Data, which tracks economic data from around the world, has documented Iranian crude oil exports from 1980 to 2018 on its website. Pakistan is not among the listed countries.
