A former Iranian foreign minister and two top TV celebrities are among several figures suspected of being involved in corruption, the reformist Tehran newspaper Shargh has revealed. Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki, and well-known hosts on Iranian state television, Mehran Modiri and Ehsan Alikhani, are among those suspected of having received massive illegal loans.
As Shargh reports, in a letter to the director of Iran’s central bank, Mottaki denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the newspaper’s head had told him that it was the Central Bank’s request for the claims against Mottaki to be published.
As the trial into the workings of the Samen ol-Hojaj financial institute gets underway, the Shargh report is explosive, indirectly revealing the names of some of the scandal’s top suspects. Following a tradition of Iranian journalism, it doesn’t publish the actual names but uses initials that makes it all but obvious who the report is talking about.
Corrupt Financial Businesses and Protests
Grievances against illegal financial institutions played a major role in fueling mass protests earlier this year. Many of these institutions habitually disappear after promising unusually high returns to attract millions of rials of deposits. Samen, whose case is being tried in a criminal court in Tehran, is the first of such institutions to face trial. It is charged with “disrupting the economic order and squandering people’s property.”
Samen opened doors in 2001 with a capital of 63 million rials. But in 2009, the last year in which it provided a balance sheet for its books, it reported that it had 870 billion rials — meaning it had increased its initial capital almost 14,000 times. By 2015, when it was closed down by the order of the judiciary, this had reached the astronomical sum of 123,000 billion.
There are three leading defendants in this case. The main accused (“Defendant no. 1,” in Iranian legal parlance, which ranks the defendants based on the degree of their participation in the crime) is Abololfazl Mirali, Samen’s managing director and a member of its board of directors. Defendant no. 2 is Robabe Ebrahimi, Mirali’s wife and a fellow member of the board of directors. Defendant no. 3 is Mehdi Ramezanian, who is yet to attend any of the trials and is suspected of having fled Iran.
Mirali’s biography has fascinated Iranian media in recent days. He used to be a prosecutor for the Special Court of the Clergy in Mashhad, Iran’s second biggest city (the SCC is tasked with prosecuting the crimes of the clergy). In 2001, he launched Samen ol-Hojaj as a cooperative financial institution that, according to its constitution, was to be active only within the confines of the city of Sabzevar, which has a population of 250,000 and lies 230 kilometers west of Mashhad. It was also only supposed to employ people who at least hold a post-secondary associate degree and give small loans to its employees. In practice, however, Samen was to open more than 480 branches all over the country and its first employee was Mirali himself, whose highest academic qualification was a high school diploma.
Mirali headed Samen’s board of directors from the outset until 2006, when he left for two years, only to return in 2008 to the same position. From 2010 to 2015 (when Samen closed down), Mirali was both managing director and head of the board of directors. His lawyer claimed his experience in gardening and husbandry was equivalent to a post-secondary degree. Mirali’s financial past is also shrouded in mystery, as 119 of his checks bounced before he started Samen. The intelligence ministry had once, in 2013, declared him to be unqualified, but he was simply kept in his position.
Government figures
Shargh’s reporting shows that the corruption in Samen wasn’t limited to the members of the board of directors. As a cooperative institution, it was to only offer loans to its employees, who had to be residents of the small city of Sabzevar. But it was to do much more. Today it is charged with abusing its nominal status of being supervised by the Central Bank, offering massive loans with low interest rates to well-connected people and offering loans without collateral.
Samen’s files show it has offered 255 counts of loans, ranging from 10 billion to 2000 billion rials, with a usual interest rate of three to four percent. A Mr S.Sh, for instance, received a loan of 500 billion rials with an interest rate of three percent. A Ms T.M got 430 billion rials with a rate of four percent. Shargh’s most explosive finding was that Mottaki, who was billed as Samen’s advisor for international affairs, received a loan of 1,240 billion rials.
“A high-ranking family linked to the government” had also been involved in a number of illegal doings, Shargh said. A member of the family, a Mr H.S, received 1000 billion rials, which was said to be his salary of 30 years being paid in one go. His father is a leading official who was also an “advisor” to Samen and who received a monthly salary of 51 million rials for the task. Ms. F.P (H.S.’s wife) received a loan of 10.2 billion rials. Their daughter, M.S, was employed by Samen and now owes the institute more than 20 billion rials in unpaid loans. Samen had also purchased two counts of real estate in the central Iranian cities of Yazd and Isfahan from F.P. and her daughter M.S. It paid the family 500 billion rials for a piece of land in Yazd (an unusually high price) and 10 billion rials for an apartment in Isfahan.
Celebrities
According to Shargh, In 2013, Samen gave 5.8 billion rials in payments to Mehran Modiri, perhaps Iran’s most celebrated television comedian of a generation. This was paid in two counts, in March and September 2013, and the payments had been simply billed as a“gift.” But the gift is small compared to the loans Modiri allegedly received. He received a loan of 29 billion rials, of which he only paid back 8 billion rials. A bit of calculation (subtracting the ‘gift” from the amount paid back) shows that Modiri only paid back 2.2 billion rials and has kept a full 27.8 billion rials to himself.
Ehsan Alikhani, a 36-year-old TV host, has also allegedly received a payment of 30 billion rials from Samen which was billed as “advertisement expenses.”
Importing Rice, Selling Handball Players
Among the stranger operations in which Samen was involved is the importing of rice and swapping of handball players. In 2012, it broke the law by importing 690 tons of rice for an individual identified as “A.” It was also involved in buying and selling handball players until the Iranian Handball Federation got involved and asked for the practice to stop.
As the trial of Samen goes on, more light will be shed on the corrupt dealings that have come to symbolize the moral bankruptcy of the Islamic Republic, which was founded on egalitarian claims but ended up harboring an oligarchic capitalism mired by endemic corruption.
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