Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, May 30, 2020—With seven percent of the world's natural resources, Iran is one of the richest countries in the world. Accordingly, Iran only has one percent of the world's population, which means the Iranian people should have seven times the average welfare in the world and make more economic progress. But the reality of the Iranian people’s everyday lives in no way reflects these numbers.
The Iranian economy suffers from inflation, unemployment crisis, high prices, job insecurity, and hundreds and thousands of economic and social problems.
The question is, where is Iran's capital spent that causes so much suffering for the Iranian people?
On May 20, the state-run Etemad Online news website quoted Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, former MP from Kermanshah and member of the Majlis Security & Foreign Affairs Commission, as saying: “We may have given $20-30 billion to Syria.”
“When I went to Syria, some complained that I had caused expenses, but I will say this again: We may have given $20-30 billion to Syria. The money of this nation was spent there,” Falahatpisheh said.
This, of course, is not the regime’s entire expenses in Syria. For nine years, Tehran has had an active role in Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s war against the Syrian people. The Iranian regime has sent about 80,000 Afghan, Pakistani, and Iraqi mercenaries to this country and paid them approximately $9 billion in wages.
The regime’s expenditures on ammunition and weapons in the Syrian war are skyrocketing. Add to this the expenses of Tehran’s intervention in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain. The regime has spent tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Iran’s wealth on its warmongering policies in the Middle East, which has resulted in poverty and misery for the Iranian people.
Zarif once revealed that the regime had paid $35 billion to several people to help circumvent sanctions, and “it’s not clear where the money is now.”
According to the budget deduction report, it’s not clear what happened to the government’s U.S.-currency reserves in 2017. An amount of $4.8 billion was distributed among importers without importing goods and $2.7 billion was spent for soil, dog and cat food.
Summing up the $30 billion paid to Bashar al-Assad, $35 billion paid for sanctions circumvention, and the $4.8 billion missing from the government budget, a total of at least $70 billion of Iran’s wealth has been squandered on things that have no benefit for the people.
It is also important to know that less than 65 countries in the world have a budget close to $70 billion dollars. With this money, more than 4.8 billion stable jobs could be created. The average cost of creating a stable job is 250 million tomans (approx. $14,000).
With this money 1.5 million standards hospital beds could be procured. If we divide this money among the people of Iran, each person would get approx. $875. This money could help build 6 million school classes and pay the wages of the poor workers for five years. This money is equivalent to a 30-year cash subsidy for the Iranian people. With this money, Iranian wheat for 20 years and Iranian meat for 9 years could be supplied for free. So that each Iranian would be given 40 kilograms of meat. This money is equivalent to 1,170 tons of gold.
And this is just the expense of one of the destructive agendas of the regime. The mullahs have also spent hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
When Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former regime president and the chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, was alive, he revealed: “It is unclear what [regime president]Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done with $700-800 billion of oil income.” Today it is clearer than ever how the wealth of the Iranian people has been looted. A fraction of embezzlement and theft that happens among regime officials would topple governments elsewhere in the world. But in the corrupt regime of the mullahs, government corruption has become the daily norm.
This, of course, will increase the public outrage and hate for the mullahs and will trigger social and political revolutions. For 40 years, the mullahs have been able to get away with incessant stealing, looting and plundering of the Iranian people’s wealth. But all things come to an end, especially when they’re rooted in evil.
