Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, August 9, 2021—On Sunday, Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian regime’s criminal president, declared the first two appointments for his cabinet. Mohammad Mokhber will serve Raisi’s first vice president and Gholam Hossein Esmaili as his chief of staff. Unsurprisingly, like Raisi himself, his appointees are two regime officials with deep criminal records.
Mokhber was appointed as the head of Execution of Khomeini’s Order (EIKO) in 2007. EIKO is a major economic conglomerate that is part of the tax-exempt institutions that directly report to Ali Khamenei, the regime’s supreme leader. Over the decades, EIKO has plundered billions of dollars from the Iranian people’s assets. According to a Reuters report in 2013, EIKO holds $95 billion in assets. In January 2021, the U.S. placed sanctions on EIKO and other regime-run institutions, describing them as entities whose assets “have been used by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to enrich his office, reward his political allies, and persecute the regime’s perceived enemies.”
Before running EIKO, Mokhber was the Deputy Director of Commerce and Transport for the Mostazafan Foundation, another corrupt regime-run conglomerate. He has also served as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sina Bank.
In the last 14 years, Mokber has had a significant role in seizing and confiscating properties from the Iranian people, especially from the families and relatives of members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), political prisoners, and religious minorities. On June 17, 2013, then-judiciary chief Sadegh Amoli Larijani issued an order in which he named EIKO as “the only authorized body do deal with the Supreme Leader’s properties” and ordered all courts in the country to “investigate the undeclared properties (confiscated properties) … which have not yet been identified, registered and possessed, and issue supplementary rulings in favor of the EIKO.”
Since the appointment of Mokber as the head of EIKO, billions of dollars of the properties and assets of the Iranian people have been plundered in the service of the regime’s machinery of repression and warmongering and the unpatriotic nuclear and missile programs. Mokhber has played an active role in financing the terrorist activities of Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and its proxies in the region. The criminal leaders of the Iraqi al-Hashd al-Shaabi (“Popular Mobilization Forces”) and other regime proxy-militias in the region met with Mokhber whenever they traveled to Iran.
The EU slapped sanctions against Mokhber in 2010 for his role in the regime’s missile and nuclear activities. In 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted Mokhber for his role in seizing the assets of political opponents and religious minorities.
Under Mokhber, EIKO was also involved in the Covid-19 vaccination fiasco that has resulted in the tragic spread of the deadly virus across Iran. After Khamenei declared a ban on WHO-approved covid vaccines, EIKO undertook the failed and constantly delayed project of developing the domestic Barekat vaccine. Barekat was release after several postponed deadlines and failed to gain the approval of international health bodies due to unreliable test data.
Gholam Hossein Esmaili was the head of the regime’s Prisons Organization from 2009 to 2014. The scandal over the torture of prisoners, especially in Evin forced the regime to remove him from that post. Prior to that post, Esmaili was the Public Prosecutor and Revolutionary Prosecutor of Mashhad, under whose tenure many arrests, tortures, and executions took place. Subsequently, he became the Tehran Prosecutor and the Judiciary Spokesman. In April 2011, the European Union imposed sanctions on Esmaili for widespread and severe human rights abuses, including participation in the detention of political protesters and the cover-up of human rights abuses in prisons.
