Tehran Denies China May Buy Top Iranian Football Club
A Chinese businessman says he wants to buy a state-owned top-flight Iranian football club mired in debt – but the claim has been dismissed by Tehran.
A Chinese businessman says he wants to buy a state-owned top-flight Iranian football club mired in debt – but the claim has been dismissed by Tehran.
A video posted on Friday showed the Chinese national watching a match in Abadan between his target club Esteghlal and Naft FC.
In the clip published by Borna news agency, which is affiliated with the ministry of sports, the businessman said he wants to buy Esteghlal.
He presented himself as the representative of a Chinese state company, and said that he plans to visit Iran's football infrastructure to start negotiations to invest in the popular football club.
But on Saturday the IRNA state news agency wrote that the managers of Esteghlal are not aware of this proposal. It added that the law prohibits Esteghlal and Persepolis clubs from being sold to foreigners.
IRNA said all the claims and reports of the possible purchase are false.
Both state-owned and two of the biggest football clubs in Iran, Esteghlal and Persepolis are in dire financial trouble. Although the clubs are both successful on the field, off the field their stability is now in doubt due to the mounting debt.
Esteghlal owe millions of dollars to its previous foreign players and coaches, while Persepolis have suffered financially within the past years.
The Asian FC Champions League (ACL) have already banned Esteghlal for one season due to unpaid debts. Now the Iranian giants face a second straight year that they might be excluded from the competition.
As a result of their failure to meet the entry requirements for the 32-team tournament, Esteghlal, their arch-rival Persepolis, and Gol Gohar Sirjan were expelled from the competition last season.
Rouhani in a meeting on May 3 with his former officials and aides said that before his term in office ended in mid-2021, his government had convinced the Biden administration not only to lift IRGC’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation by the Trump administration, but also to lift sanctions on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office and entities.
Rouhani has recently been holding regular meetings with his former aides, which is seen as an act of opposition toward hardliners, which control all three branches of the government.
One of the first foreign policy initiatives by the Biden administration in early 2021 was to launch indirect negotiations with the Islamic Republic to revive the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal that former President Donald Trump had abandoned in 2018. This entailed lifting of sanctions that Trump had imposed.
The talks that lasted 18 months and eventually reached a deadlock in September 2022, were partly kept secret, and it is not clear if Washington had agreed to lifting the sanctions that Rouhani is taking credit for.
One thing which is clear is a five-month hiatus in the negotiations in Vienna from June to November of 2021 – the period from Iran’s presidential elections to when the new administration decided to return to talks.
Iran’s hardliners had readied themselves to capture the presidency, with Khamenei’s apparent blessing. The constitutional Guardian Council loyal to the Supreme Leader, disqualified most serious candidates, leaving the path open for Khamenei loyalist Ebrahim Raisi to get elected in a low-turnout vote.
Whatever Rouhani’s negotiating team had achieved in the nuclear talks from April to June 2021 became meaningless once the hardliners took office.
Rouhani was quoted by reformist media on Saturday as having said during his meeting that his government had wanted to solve as many problems as possible for the incoming administration. “Everything was completed for the revival of the JCPOA and was ready,” he was quoted as saying.
The former president went on to say, “When I informed the Supreme Leader [about lifting of the sanctions], he was very happy, but unfortunately this did not come to fruition.”
Rouhani also took credit for many domestic accomplishments and claimed that several major projects were almost completed and ready to be inaugurated by the new administration. He implicitly criticized the Raisi administration of not following up and leaving these projects in limbo.
In the wake of the unprecedented anti-regime protests last fall, reformist and centrist regime insiders have been trying to drive home the point that hardliners, having, monopolized power in parliament and controlled the presidency, have failed to solve the country’s multiple crises.
In fact, after the breakdown in the nuclear talks, the economic situation has worsened, with the national currency rial losing half its value against the US dollar, the euro, and other major currencies.
Many pundits and politicians have been blaming the deepening political and economic crises on the hardliners for not reaching a nuclear agreement with the United States, which would lift crippling sanctions.
The judiciary said in a statement published by Mizan News, its official news website, that the execution sentence for “corruption on earth” passed on Chaab in 2022 was carried out Saturday morning. The judiciary had announced the confirmation of the death sentence on March 12.
Chaab, 49, was put on trial by a revolutionary court in Tehran in December. He was not allowed to choose his own defense attorney and was represented in his trial by a court-appointed lawyer. He was also forced under duress to make self-incriminating confessions.
Iranian authorities say Chaab was found guilty for leading ASMLA (Harakat al-Nidal in Arabic), a movement which advocates the separation of southwestern Khuzestan Province and for plotting "numerous bombings and terrorist operations" in the oil-rich province with a large Arabic speaking population.
Tehran classifies the ASMLA as a ‘terrorist’ organization responsible for acts of terror including an attack on a military parade in Ahvaz on September 22, 2018, which killed 25 military and civilians. ASMLA accepted responsibility for the bombing.
Iranian authorities accused Chaab of receiving funding for the operations of the rebel group from Saudi Arabia and claimed that he was “protected” by Israel’s Mossad and the Swedish intelligence (SAPO). The prosecution also claimed that other ASMLA leaders are based in other European countries, namely Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.
On March 14 2022, a day after the confirmation of Chaab’s death sentence, Sweden summoned Iran's ambassador to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs “to receive Sweden’s protest against the death penalty issued against detained Swedish citizen Habib Chaab.”
“The Government has demanded that the death penalty not be enforced and recalled the EU’s common position, which condemns all use of the death penalty, wherever it is applied. The Ministry has also reiterated its demand for consular access to Mr. Chaab, which Minister for Foreign Affairs Tobias Billström had also previously conveyed to Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs,” the Swedish foreign ministry said in a statement at the time.
Iran's relations with Sweden have been strained since July 2022 when a Swedish court sentenced a former Iranian jailor, Hamid Nouri, to life imprisonment over executions of political prisoners in 1988.
Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Naser Kanani in a statement “strongly condemned” the Swedish court’s “politically-motivated and unacceptable” verdict against Nouri, saying the Stockholm government would be responsible for the damage the verdict would cause in bilateral relations.
In November 2020, a few days after ASMLA told Al Arabia that its leader was abducted in Turkey by Iranian security forces during a visit, Iran’s intelligence ministry issued a statement confirming that Chaab had been captured outside Iran and taken to Tehran, without mentioning where he was captured.
Ankara said in December 2020, when relations with Iran were tense just after the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, that it had arrested 13 people led by an Iranian for operations including assisting Iranian security forces in the abduction of Chaab in October of the same year on Turkish soil and delivering him to Tehran.
In March, Iran's judiciary said the Revolutionary Court of Ahvaz had sentenced six Arab activists to death for the killing of two Basij militia members, a policeman, and a conscripted soldier in two separate operations. Six others received long prison terms between 5 to 35 years by the same court. The accused belonged to the armed branch of ASMLA, the judiciary said, adding that the sentences could be appealed.
Political bottlenecks and crises are causing troubles for everyone, Hadi Khaniki told Etemad Online Thursday. But all this can hopefully lead to some kind of renovation and rejuvenation, he added. "In other words, there is hope in some kind of transformation."
Meanwhile, another prominent Iranian sociologist, Mohammad Fazeli, says "man needs to understand plurality in order to create hope." Referring to a turbulent period since September, he said, "As new dimensions in the relations between the government and the people became evident during the past year, Iran experienced a lot of days full of hope and despair."
In a sense, said Fazeli, Iranians were looking for their lost rights during the 2022 protests. He explained that society continues to live on a series of fault lines which reinforce each other. There is an economic fault line which has been activated because of various sanctions imposed on Iran. Citizens experienced deep economic problems in the 2010s with the economic growth flat, amid rising inflation.
At the same time, there has also been a social fault line. Between 84 to 86 percent of Iranians were born during the years after the 1979 Islamic revolution. They have been living with a different value system. In the meantime, new values have emerged, and many Iranians believe in those new values.
Fazeli was referring to the new generation rejecting the clerical regime’s interference in their personal lives, and their higher awareness of conditions in other countries.
Still at the same time, there is another fault line that has emerged as a result of the government's inefficiency, which has created a host of unresolved problems the population has to deal with.
The people see that the problems with environment, water, transportation, brain drain and immigration, rising inflation and so on have never been solved. At the same time, people are concerned about Iran’s rising tensions with the world.
“This is a society that lives with the tension of an uncertain future which could potentially lead to a popular revolt. Even if you failed to see this in the 2000's, you must have seen and felt it during the crises of mid 2010s. If not, you could not miss it during the protests since 2018. In that year, I called the Iranian society "a society that has lost everything it used to have," Fazeli said.
One person lost his hope, another one lost his job or business, yet another one lost the hope for living in a better world while others felt they have lost the lifestyle they were used to. Every one of them represented a large part of the Iranian society.
Even the religious people thought they lost something when they saw that commitment to religious values have declined.
Fazeli reiterated that the critical situation in Iran is caused by a series of crises as they have all converged at the same time and at the same point. He explained that in every society there are satisfied people and those who are disenchanted. But when dissidents dramatically outnumber those who are happy, then a serious political crisis will emerge.
"I saw a research paper recently in which some 24 percent of the population said their financial situation had improved during the past two years, more than 60 percent said their situation has worsened and a small number said there has been no difference for them. When the number of those who are dissatisfied is three times more, there is trouble on the horizon.
Referring to the government’s inability to deal with multiple crises he said, "If you are not improving the situation, you cannot tell the people that they have to tolerate it. The people might listen to you only if you are prepared to give something to them. And let us note that their threshold of tolerance now is extremely low."