Outgoing President of Iran Hassan Rouhani has called former US President Donald Trump a "virus", and blamed him, along with coronavirus, for inflation and the rising value of the dollar in Iran.
In the outburst at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, June 30, Rouhani claimed that were it not for Trump and the pandemic, the dollar rate would now be worth less than 5,000 tomans – rather than the 24,500 it currently values at on the open market – and Iran’s inflation rate would be 11.5 percent instead of the 36.5 percent recorded last year.
"If these two viruses did not exist,” Rouhani was quoted as saying by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, “our calculations show that the growth of our non-oil economy would have been 4.1 percent and the growth of the economy would have been 3.8 percent.”
He added: "Currently, the average inflation rate in the country is 32 percent, and were it not for these two viruses, our inflation in these three and a half years would have been 11.5 percent."
Rouhani, who is now in the final weeks of his presidency, acknowledged that the Iranian economy is currently in recession.
But, he repeated, were it not for the two “viruses”, “the country's investment growth would be 7.4 percent in the black and our GDP 22 percent greater than the current level."
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