Analysis by PMOI/MEK
March 3, 2019 – The rift among the political elite in Iran over approving the FATF bills widens everyday as the inner-quarrels of the Iranian regime reach new heights.
Abbas Araghchi, political deputy of the Iranian regime foreign minister Javad Zarif, warned rivaling politicians about the consequences of not approving the FATF bills and said: “If these conventions aren’t enacted, none of our neighbor countries, and even Russia and China which are opposed to the United States, won’t do any financial exchanges with us.”
Mashregh News website, close to Iranian regime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s faction, responds to the deputy foreign minister with another question, asking whether Russia and China are demanding Iran to join FATF or the U.S.
Mashregh News rejects Araghchi’s claims that Europe is threatening the Iranian regime to approve the FATF bills and writes: “Araghchi claims that China and Russia won’t have any banking transactions with Iran without FATF… Past experiences in Iran’s relations with Russia and China also show that from 2009 until 2015 when Iran was in FATF’s blacklist, these two countries had banking relations with Iran. Therefore, FATF is not so much important to China and Russia that they will cut their relations with Iran.”
While Araghchi tries to persuade opponents to approve the bills by warning about the regime’s isolation even among its allies, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of Keyhan newspaper, said on February 28: “Colonialist bills like FATF mean that we give the enemy all our financial transactions! Is there any country that is ready to give the enemy its military and defense intelligence in times of war?”
According to Fars news agency, close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, secretaries of student unions studied the consequences of accepting the bills in a roundtable called “the student movement and a no to FATF” and warn about the dangerous ramifications saying: “It is said that not accepting the bills is the cause of economic difficulties, but if so, what is the role of the $40-billion damage of Mr. [Abbas Ahmad] Akhoundi [former Minister of Roads and Urban Development] in the Boeing incident and its impact on the country’s economic situation? What is the role of the damages created by the Healthcare Change Plan? What is the role of the currency, coin, and gold mafia in the country and where are they connected to? If we are supposed to search for culprits for the economic situation, the role of all of these need to be determined.”
Even the proponents of approving the FATF bills can’t hide the dead-end the Iranian regime faces.
Ismail Gerami Moghaddam, spokesperson for the National Trust Party, says: “although you can’t say that by approving these bills a big opening will happen in the economic sector, but fact is that if they aren’t approved, the situation will definitely deteriorate and foreseeing the deterioration isn’t difficult.”
Meanwhile, Tasnim news agency quoted Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moghadam, member of the Expediency Discernment Council, saying that the “opponents of approving Palermo [bill] in the expediency council have increased.”
Despite the controversy and the inevitable fallout, the Iranian regime has a hard time to decide what to do with the remaining two FATF bills. None of the options on the table are “good” for the ruling theocracy in Iran, so officials and power holders of different factions are struggling for the option that will minimize their own losses while the whole mullahcracy will take the eventual damage at its core.
If the Iranian regime enacts the FATF bills, the consequences will run through the veins of its power structure like a toxic agent, devastating the central philosophy to Velayate Faqih.
And if it doesn’t, the current economic isolation will become exacerbated dramatically.
Either way, it’ll be a win for the Iranian people and their resistance.
