TEHRAN: Iran’s oil minister on Tuesday dismissed an output freeze deal between the world’s top two producers Saudi Arabia and Russia as “a joke”, the ISNA news agency reported.

“Some neighbouring countries have increased their production over the years to 10 million barrels per day and export this amount, then say let’s all freeze our oil production,” Bijan Zanganeh said.

“They freeze production at 10m bpd and we freeze at 1m bpd. This is a very funny joke.”

In a bid to stabilise an oversupplied market, Russia and Opec members Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Qatar announced on Tuesday that they had reached a preliminary deal to freeze output at January levels, provided that other major producers followed suit.

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2016