Budget Ploughs Six Times More Into 'Public Order and Security' Than Water

The Raisi administration’s 2022-23 budget bill has allocated more than 54.8 trillion tomans (US$13bn) to “maintaining public order and security”: 25 times the amount ring-fenced for environmental protection, and six times the budget for addressing the country’s urgent water crisis.

Research by Iran Open Data found the IRGC’s Shahid Ebrahimi program, whose stated mission is to “strengthen security infrastructure”, had received the biggest increase – by about 386 percent – in funding compared to last year.  Large swathes of the budget bill’s Security chapter were given over to discussion of the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization (IRGC-IO), a rival of the MoI. Several entities under IRGC-IO’s control appear more than once, in different sections of the budget, and are set to receive additional funding.

The Ministry of Intelligence also received 10 trillion tomans (US$3.7bn) for its operations, an increase of nearly 30 percent year-on-year. Within this was almost 2 trillion tomans for a project called Shahid (Martyr) Shateri, under whose auspices at least 23 parcels of land and property in Tehran were secretly transferred to the IRGC-IU for use as “safe houses”- in all likelihood, intelligence detention centers – from 2005 and 2017.

Of the money earmarked for the Ministry of Intelligence, two new spending categories were listed in the budget: a project called “Shahid Ashuri, and something called the “Information Exchange Security Center”. Other MoI projects including the Herasat (literally “protection) branch, which monitors employees at civilian departments and university campuses, saw their budgets cut – in Herasat’s case from 9bn to 6bn tomans – or merged.

The Iran Open Data team added: “It is safe to assume that there are other security-intelligence related categories that are secret and therefore not listed in the budget bill. A case in point in the Judiciary Information and Protection Center, which is one of the biggest and most controversial parallel intelligence agencies in the country.”

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