An Iranian lawmaker says that Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has written a letter to President Hassan Rouhani asking him to make changes in his controversial budget bill submitted for the new Iranian year starting March 21, 2021.

Rahim Zare’e who is a member of parliament’s budget reconciliation committee told local media that the letter was sent on December 15, after the hardliner majority in parliament strongly objected to Rouhani’s proposed budget. Their main criticism is about what they say “unrealistic” revenue projections, that forecast $26.5 billion of oil exports amid US sanctions.

Iran’s daily oil exports before President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, and imposed sanctions, was more than two million barrels, but from May 2018 Tehran lost almost 90 percent of its exports. Since then, the government has faced a serious shortfall in vital revenues and it simply has nowhere to turn to make up what was around 50 billion dollars of annual oil revenues in 2017.

The Wall Street Journal reported December 15 that Iran’s oil exports, largely secret and disguised, have increased in recent months, although it is difficult to gauge by how much. Estimates range from 500,000 barrels per day of exports to more than one million barrels. At the beginning of 2020, Iran was exporting less than 200,000 barrels per day.

The main customers for the increased oil shipments appear to be China that buys crude and Venezuela that buys gasoline from Iran.

China was always buying Iranian oil during the sanctions, but at one-tenth of pre-sanctions levels, while other big customers such as India stopped all imports when in May 2019 the United States imposed a blanket ban on other countries to buy oil from Iran. However, it was reported that China was not paying any cash, as that would be another sanctions violation for Chinese banks. Instead, Beijing was importing the oil to recoup investments it had made in Iran.

Whether the Rouhani administration’s high expectation about oil sales in 2021 is related to the reported increase in exports, is difficult to say, but it is hard to believe China would pay cash for the oil as long as US banking sanctions remain in place.

Nevertheless, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Rouhani this week called for “breaking” US sanctions. This is an open call to circumvent US sanctions and maybe a strategy to test President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration to see if it will enforce Trump’s sanctions as vigorously as it has been enforced in the past two years. Unenforced sanctions would be tantamount to ‘no sanctions’, as far as the cash-starved Iranian government is concerned.