India doesn’t plan to use Venezuela’s ‘petro’ cryptocurrency to pay for crude oil imports from the Latin American nation of which it is a large regular customer, India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Monday. India’s central bank has issued an order saying that it doesn’t allow trade in cryptocurrency, Swaraj said at a news conference, citing that order. India’s average oil imports from Venezuela have recently slumped to their lowest level since 2012. Venezuela faces increasingly stricter U.S. financial sanctions and is trying to circumvent them by offering the customers of its declining oil production to pay in the El Petro cryptocurrency, touted by Nicolas Maduro as the first-ever sovereign digital currency backed by oil reserves. India, on the other hand, faces an increasingly fatter crude oil import bill, as oil prices have rallied in the past few months and worsened Indian current accounts, with officials already worried […]