The CEO of the National Iranian Drilling Company announced an investment of $800 million from the National Iranian Oil Company's resources to purchase 15 onshore drilling rigs this year, and said: "About $200 to $300 million from the company's domestic foreign exchange resources will be allocated to supply ancillary equipment such as cementing pumps and nitrogen."

It might not be wrong to claim that the 1990s were one of the most corrupt decades in Iran's oil history. The decade in which the massive Petrochemicalgate corruption scandal was revealed was close to the same years in which the issue of missing oil rigs became a subject of black satire.