(VOVworld) – Airbus and Boeing announced Wednesday that they have received licenses from the US Treasury Department to sell commercial passenger aircraft to Iran, with sales worth billions of dollars.

The Airbus A380 at Farnborough International Airshow Trade 2016 (Photo: TTXVN)

Airbus confirmed that it received the first license for a sale of 17 planes, part of a larger deal that involves a total of 118 planes, and expects a second license in the coming weeks. Though Airbus is a European consortium, it needs the approval of the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) because a portion of Airbus planes are made in the US. Boeing later announced that the US government has granted it licenses to deliver planes to Iran Air. The approval allows Boeing to fulfill its June memorandum of understanding with Iran Air, marking their first deal since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The deal is estimated to be worth roughly 25 billion USD.

The deal was made possible by last year’s nuclear agreement between Tehran and the P5+1 group of countries, which includes Russia, China, France, Britain, the US and Germany. The US House of Representatives in July passed two bills that would block the aircraft sales, but to become law they would need to be approved by the Senate and signed by President Barack Obama.