Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Iran Changes Currency to Toman


Mon 04 May 2020 | 01:57 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

The parliament in Iran approved a bill allowing the government to delete four zeros from its currency; riyal, relabel it to Toman, following a sharp devaluation of it due to US sanctions.

As per the bill ‘Reforming Monetary and Banking Law’, the monetary unit will change officially from the rial to the commonly used toman.

Furthermore, the minor monetary unit of the new currency will be the ‘parseh’.

So, as per the newly ratified law, 10,000 rials will be equal to 1 toman and each toman will be equal to 100 parseh.

The parity rate of foreign currencies will be set and adjusted by the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) as per the new currency system.

"The law to delete four zeros from the national currency was approved by lawmakers," the ISNA news agency said.

The bill, however, needs approval from a panel of clerics that examines the laws before they become effective in Iran.

Meanwhile, the official Iranian television announced that it will have two years for the central bank to pave the way for changing the currency to the Toman.

The idea to delete 4 zeros from the Iranian currency first emerged in 2008, but it became more urgent after 2018, when US President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions, when the riyal lost more than 60% of its value.

The value of the dollar was 32,000 riyals at signing the nuclear deal in 2015, but the recent US sanctions have caused it to deteriorate a lot.

According to foreign exchange rates sites, the Iranian currency recorded about 156 thousand riyals per dollar in the informal market yesterday.

According to CBI, there are 8 billion pieces of banknotes circulating in the country and regularly impose high costs of printing new money on the government.