Iran said yesterday it was “not concerned” about an imminent EU ban on its oil, saying it would endure the extra sanctions even though they amounted to “an economic war.”

“Iran has always been ready to counter such hostile actions and we are not concerned at all about the sanctions,” Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in a joint news conference with visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

“We have taken provisional measures. We have weath-ered the storm for the past 32 years and we will be able to survive this as well,” Mr Salehi said. “These sanctions are an economic war against us,” Economy Minister Shamseddin Hosseini said, according to the official Irna news agency.

Diplomats in Brussels said on Wednesday that the 27-nation EU bloc has reached an “agreement in principle” to ban all Iranian oil imports and was discussing the timing of when the measure would begin. The ban would add to other sanctions already imposed by the West, inclu-ding a US measure enacted last weekend that targets Iran’s central bank, which processes most of the Islamic republic’s oil sales.

The EU is the second-biggest destination for Iranian oil after China, accounting for around 15 per cent of the 2.6 million barrels exported each day, or some 450,000 barrels. Iran relies on oil sales for 80 per cent of its foreign revenues.

The West is squeezing Iran over its nuclear programme, which the United States and allied nations fear is being used to develop an atomic bomb. Iran insists that the nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful, civilian use and has warned that it could resort to drastic measures if it is directly threatened.