Pundits Say Iran's Government In Disarray And Warn Of Mass Unrest
A former lawmaker says the Iranian government is in disarray, and a political analyst argues the current economic crisis is likely to lead to large protests.
A former lawmaker says the Iranian government is in disarray, and a political analyst argues the current economic crisis is likely to lead to large protests.
Former lawmaker Gholam Ali Jafarzadeh Imanabadi told Nameh News website in Tehran on Tuesday that the Iranian government has already collapsed, and it will be too late when President Raisi finds out what his advisers have done to the country and the government."
Imanabadi, a moderate-conservative politicians, charged that "Iran has 6 Presidents." He explained that Vice President Mohammad Mokhber has pushed out the Vice President for Economic Affairs Mohsen Rezaei, and Vice President for Executive Affairs Solat Mortazavi from the government's Economic Commission, but to wat extent can this measure make Raisi's economic team efficient?"
He charged that while the current economic crisis is the country's most important issue, Raisi knows very little about the economy and his team is still extremely weak and uncoordinated."
Imanabadi said that "all the 6 contestants in the 2021 Presidential election, including Raisi are members of the Raisi Administration." He added: "In other words, the government has 6 presidents, like the proverb 'Too many chiefs and few Indians' ".
"All the existing evidence points to differences in the government's economic team," he said, asking "How can the vice president for economic affairs not be a member of the government's economic team?"
Imanabadi explained: "The is so much pressure on Raisi and he cannot do anything other than make more promises because his economic team does not help him. Planning and Budget Chief Massoud Mirkazemi does whatever pleases him regardless of Raisi’s promises to the people and Mokhber is a big bluffer. We still remember that he said: Five big countries are buying [Covid] vaccines from Iran."
The lawmaker charged that while everything in the country's economy is linked to the nuclear deal, and every interview with Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian raises the exchange rate for the US dollar by 10,000 rials, Raisi still insists that he will not tie the fate of the economy to the nuclear deal (JCPOA).
What the lawmaker did not mention, is the fact that trying to publicly minimize the impact of US sanctions is a regime-wide policy imposed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Meanwhile, Political analyst Ali Mohammad Namazi has said in an interview that "If the current situation continues, widespread protests are likely in Iran." Namazi stressed that the Iranian government should reach a nuclear agreement with the United States as soon as possible."
Namazi warned that Iran's treasury is almost broke and the government is not even able to make overdue payments." He exclaimed "Why there is still no nuclear agreement while the economic situation is getting increasingly difficult?"
He quoted other analysts as saying that nothing has changed in the new draft nuclear agreement compared to the one prepared under President Hassan Rouhani," last year and suggested that "The government should be determined to sign the final agreement without insisting on irrelevant matters. But the negotiating team is more focused on symbolic moves rather than on technically down-to-the-point negotiations."
He was implicitly referring to Tehran’s demand for removing the IRGC from the US list of terrorist organizations that have halted the Vienna talks.
Namazi said, "a final agreement will bring about an economic breakthrough that would lead to releasing Iran's frozen assets and facilitate oil normal oil exports. Non-nuclear sanctions can be left for a future when the two sides can have discussions beyond the nuclear issue."
Zabihollah Khodaeian, the judiciary spokesman, told reporters Tuesday that Ahmad Hashemi-Shahroudi was also liable for "returning the funds" in the case involving Sarmayeh Bank. But some media have claimed Hashemi-Shahroudi fled to Iraq when a business partner, Mohammad Emami, was arrested in 2016. Emami has been sentenced to a 20-year prison term, according to Khodaeian.
Another defendant in the case, Shahabeddin Ghandali, former chief executive officer of the Iran Teachers’ Reserve Fund, was arrested in 2016 on charges of embezzling $2.5 billion. The fund, which has 800,000 members and is run by the education ministry, was an investor in Sarmayeh Bank.
According to a confidential report of the Iranian parliament leaked by reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi in December 2020, Hashemi-Shahroudi and Emami took loans from Sarmayeh between 2012 and 2014 to invest in property. They subsequently sold the properties to Sarmayeh at far higher prices, with the bank − according to the report − waiving penalties for late repayment.
The fund lost nearly $3.5 billion of its investments in Sarmayeh Bank as a result of fraud perpetrated by, according to judicial officials, over 400 individuals.
Parviz Kazemi, minister of labor and social welfare under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cabinet, Ammar Salehi, son of army commander Ataollah Salehi, and Hadi Razavi, son-in-law of Mohammad Shariatmadari, minister of labor in Hassan Rouhani's cabinet, were among defendants in the case.
Corruption and cronyism, often associated with political figures and groups, has plagued Iran for over a decade. There have been several massive fraud and embezzlement cases since then, including in major banks and other financial institutions.
In 2017 and 2018 corruption in the financial sector and rising prices sparked the biggest wave of anti-government protests since the unrest over a disputed election in 2009.
In October 2020, Spain extradited Sarmayeh’s former chief executive officer (CEO), Alireza Heydar-Abadipour, who had been arrested in 2019 following a "red notice" to Interpol issued by Iranian police. Heydar-Abadipour had been sentenced in absentia to a 12-year prison sentence for fraud and embezzlement.
Lacking an extradition agreement with Canada, Iran was unable to pursue Mahmoud-Reza Khavari, the former CEO of the state-owned Melli Bank, who fled to Canada in 2010, after being accused of embezzling billions of dollars.
In 2017 and 2018, protesters who lost their deposits in the Samen al-Hojaj Finance and Credit Institution in Khorasan province held rallies in front of banks and other financial institutions. Samen al-Hojaj, which went into liquidation, had lent tens of millions of dollars at a very low interest rate and paid high salaries to some officials, while not paying dividends to small investors lured with promises of high returns.
Speaking at a pharmaceutical seminar Monday, Dr Ramin Sarami, chairman of the health ministry's new medical technologies, said the number of programs to develop seven variants exceeded the total of all approved vaccines in the world. "These [projects] could have been limited to two vaccine development centers," he said.
Iran approved development of seven different vaccines – including CovIran Barekat (Barakat), Pasto-Covac, Sinagen, Razi Cov Pars, Fakhra, Noora, and SpikoGen -- when there were less than ten other major vaccine development projects underway worldwide and even fewer that received international approval. None of the Iranian varieties received international approval. Even neighboring Iraq does not admit travelers vaccinated by Iranian variants. 18 million doses are stored and are about to expire.
CovIran Barakat, the most widely promoted homegrown vaccine, was developed by Barakat Foundation, a charitable entity and business group controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office, while the program for development of Noora and Fakhra were launched by the Revolutionary Guards and the ministry of defense. These entities had no prior record and experience in the field or the required infrastructures.
The expiration of stored homegrown vaccines is a symbolic representation of uncalculated decision-making and policies in the country, a commentary by political activist Ehsan Bodaghi in reformist Shargh newspaper said Tuesday. "There isn't even domestic demand for the vaccines that were supposed to have long queues of foreign buyers and become our pride," Bodaghi wrote.
Bodaghi said the authorities' uncalculated vaccine policies caused thousands of hours of work, months of delay in mass vaccination, and huge sums of government resources but more importantly, he argued, the loss of "public trust".
In January 2021, when the US-German Pfizer and Moderna and the British-made AstraZeneca were the only shots available, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei banned importing US and British-made vaccines, arguing that the US and Britain could not be trusted. Khamenei told Iranians that he would personally wait until homegrown vaccines became available. He was reported to have received the CovIran Barekat vaccine in June.
Until June 2021, Iran's national vaccination plan had not made any significant progress, with only 1.2 percent of the 84 million population having been fully inoculated. Many countries in the region were well into mass vaccination at the time.
Hardliners, who in general extol self-sufficiency, claimed imported vaccines could be used as a biological weapon against Iranians and a high-ranking Revolutionary Guard official said foreign vaccines were meant to kill one-fifth of the world population.
Most Iranians did not trust the homegrown vaccines and waited until other vaccines, mainly Chinese and some AstraZeneca produced in countries other than Britain, were imported.
Imports did not speed up until August, when hardliner President Ebrahim Raisi took office and somehow China began delivering tens of millions of doses. By then, a severe wave of infections had already killed an additional 40,000 people from June to the end of August.
The controversy over Barekat’s vaccine development went beyond the alleged pre-payment of $1 billion to the company from government coffers. Officials of the foundation including Mohammad Mokhber, now President Ebrahim Raisi's vice-president, had repeatedly promised to deliver tens of millions of doses by the end of August. By September 2021, the company had only produced 14 million doses, according to one of its officials, and delivered only six million to the health ministry.
The official Telegram channel of the Revolutionary Guard was strangely one of the first to report that Senior Vice President Mohammad Mokhber had dismissed two members of Raisi's Economic Commission: Vice President for Executive Affairs Solat Mortazavi and Vice President for Economic Affairs Mohsen Rezaei.
The announcement sounded odd enough as Rezaei is a vice president after all. The other oddity was the discrepancy between the letter signed by Mokhber, which indicated that the dismissal was based on several articles of the law, and the statement of government spokesman Ali Bahadori who said the two were relieved of their responsibilities at their own request.
Monday evening both the government spokesman and Rezaei denied the reports, insisting that no change has taken place in the government's economic team.
But based on the letter reported in Tehran media dated April 20, the decision to get rid of the two was made on March 27. Iranian media have approached the story in a way to indicate that Rezaei may no longer be part of Raisi's team altogether.
Rezaei was initially introduced by Raisi last year as the chairman of the commission. Like all Raisi rivals in the 2021 presidential election, Rezaei was also given a good post. However, the difference was that he was the only one who was not linked to any political group or party.
When he joined Raisi's economic team, he thought that he would be leading the team. Soon, it was made bitterly clear to him that Mokhber oversaw the team. The first sign came in December when Rezaei announced that cash handouts to citizens will be doubled. Mokhber ordered Economy Minister Ehsan Khandouzi to refute the statement in half an hour.
It was clear then, though maybe not for Rezaei, that he was appointed to the post of vice president as a sign of courtesy by Raisi as he had paid the same courtesy to all other presidential contestants.
In the meantime, almost everyone in Iran has been criticizing Raisi and his team for the worsening economic situation. Rezaei's dismissal, if true, could be something to prove that the president finally decided to act. The other man, Mortazavi, was probably dismissed only to make sure that the measure would not look like an action against Rezaei.
However, some say that as Mortazavi headed the State Employment Organization, his opposition on legal grounds to some of administration’s appointments cost him his job.
Hamid Hosseini, an economist in Tehran, told Nameh News that several people in the economic team wanted to be its leader: Mokhber, Rzaei, Khandouzi, and Planning and Budget Chief Massoud Mirkazemi. This was part of the struggle that has so far led to jettisoning Rezaei. The economic team's other problems are caused by managing problematic officials such as Labor Minister Hojjat Abdolmalehi and Housing Minister Rostam Ghassemi.
Speculations about Rezaei's future, in case of dismissal from the Economic Commission, include leaving him to resign from the government altogether or allowing him to wander in the administration without assigning him any task or sending him back to the Expediency Council where he was the secratary. Another option is giving a job outside the administration only to save face for the former commander-in-chief of the IRGC.
According to ultraconservative former lawmaker Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, the government is under pressure to make a change in its economic team. Rezaei's possible dismissal would be the first change, and further changes are likely to be introduced at the Central Bank, the Ministry of Industry, and the Ministry of Economy.