Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, April 18, 2020—Following reports of Adel Azar, the Director of the Iranian regime’s Supreme Audit Court, on April 14 about the disappearance of $4.8 billion in the budget deduction of 2018, the state-run daily Aftab-e Yazd wrote in an article in which it confessed to the endemic corruption that has been plaguing every government under the mullahs’ rule.
“In a flashback to the years 2000-2010, we can see that this story is still repeated. There have been reports of large numbers of financial corruption cases in various governments, and from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hassan Rouhani, none of them have claimed responsibility,” Aftab-e Yazd wrote.
The paper added: “For example, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, who was Director of the Supreme Audit Court in 2008 had said in his report about the 2006 budget: ‘In the budget report of 2006 about two thousand deviations from the articles and the notes and the rules that have been neglected in the shadow of the one-billion-dollar debate.’”
Rahmani Fazli, who now serves as interior minister to incumbent regime president Hassan Rouhani, referred to a $1 billion dollar that had disappeared in the 2006 budget.
After reading the report on the 2006 budget audit, then-Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani demanded an investigation into $1bn of excess revenue from changes to oil prices. But there has been no word on the follow-up.
The daily further reminds that in a note, Ahmad Tavakoli, Head of Parliamentary research center, wrote about some of the violations in the import of petroleum products: “In 2008, the government had imported $5.8 billion worth of petroleum products instead of the legal limit of $3.8 billion.”
The paper referred to a note by regime politician Shahrbanou Amani, who last Thursday wrote, “In general, it seems that the Court of Audit does not use its legal powers as it should and has satisfied itself with only reporting. The Court of Audit must say what practical steps its prosecutors have taken to prevent, and which matters they oversaw.”
The daily Aftab-e Yazd wrote: “The media and people say an amount of nearly 768 trillion rials has disappeared! For an economy that has been sick in recent years, this is a huge amount. This report made a lot of noise and many have raised this question that while the task of such amount of money is unclear and is disappeared, how is it that the government has been consulting for a month for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to grant a $5 billion loan to Iran to spend for health and economic problems!”
This is just one of several instances of Iranian officials and state-run media admitting that corruption has become institutionalized and endemic in the regime.
The Iranian Resistance had announced time and again that Khamenei must allocate $100 billion of the capital and assets of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), the Basij, Mostazafan, and the money he spends in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon to the health and treatment of the Iranian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With this capital and money, the regime can provide medicine and medical equipment to the hospitals and the people through WHO and the International Committee of the Red Cross without any restrictions. The question remains that why Khamenei and Rouhani insist on sending millions of innocent people back to work despite the danger of COVID-19 while the regime’s vast wealth has not been spent on the crisis.
