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Why Raisi can’t and won’t fight corruption in Iran

Analysis by PMOI/MEK

Iran, September 16, 2021—On Wednesday, Iranian regime president Ebrahim Raisi introduced a 12-point plan to counter economic and management corruption.

In his cabinet meeting, Raisi claimed that one of the priorities of his government will be to identify corruption bottlenecks and to eradicate any ground for the formation of corruption in the government. “Preventing corruption is the responsibility of the government, and prosecuting corruption charges is the responsibility of the judiciary,” Raisi said.

Such claims are outrageous, considering that they are coming from the head of a government that is composed of thieves and crooks.

Raisi’s chief of staff, Mohammad Mokhber, was 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.”

And Raisi’s construction minister, Rostam Ghassemi, is a former oil minister and one of the main suspects in several embezzlement cases, including the Babak Zanjani dossier, a regime-linked businessman who along with his accomplices stole billions of dollars’ worth of oil revenue.

And Raisi continues to appoint corrupt politicians to high positions of power. Two days before introducing his counter-corruption plan, Raisi appointed Hossein Modares Khiabani as the governor of Sistan and Baluchestan province. Modarres Khiabani is so deeply involved in corruption that the Majlis (parliament) refused to give him a vote of confidence in 2020 when he was nominated as minister of industries, mines, and trading. The regime’s own analysts said on September 13 that Khiabani has received 1.17 billion rials in salary in July 2021, orders of magnitude what most Iranians are earning in an entire year.

And the judiciary that is supposed to prosecute corrupt managers is itself plagued with corruption. And it goes without saying that many of the judiciary officials who are charged with corruption charges were close associates of Raisi during his career in the judiciary branch.

Raisi’s tone on dealing with corruption, which is one of the endemic problems of the regime, has remained in the “God willing” rhetoric since he assumed office in August. To this day, neither skyrocketing prices nor the unbridled inflation have reduced one bit, and on the contrary, both have been intensified as a result of continued corruption and lack of accountability.

The prices of the most basic goods continue to rise every day. In less than a month, the price of a pack of 30 eggs has reached 650,000 rials, which is about a fourth of a worker’s monthly salary. The price of one liter of milt has reached 140,000 rials.

And the average price of one square meter of housing is 300 million rials, according to the state-run Mardom Salari newspaper.

The situation has become so disastrous that two families must share a 70-meter house with a 3-billion-rial mortgage loan, and many people are sleeping in their cars because they can’t afford homes, according to the Jahan-e Sanat newspaper. The middle classes are migrating to the impoverished parts of cities, where they have a better chance to rent home, and the poor are migrating to the slums, Jahan-e Sanat added, while senior government officials are living in villas in the north of Tehran.

And the state-run Sa’at 22 news website confirmed that more than $100 billion assets have exited the country and have been channeled to bank accounts that belong to the elite who have close ties to regime officials.

This is what the promises of dealing with corruption translate to when it comes to the people’s lives. Raisi’s predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, claimed that the world didn’t realize how the regime managed to run the economy without oil revenue. But everyone knows. The regime stole from the people, manipulated the stock market, engaged in the uncontrolled printing of banknotes, ran black markets for vital medicine, and carried out other extremely corrupt policies with impunity.

The reality is that fighting corruption in a regime whose supreme leader is the epitome of corruption is a joke. And Raisi’s promises of dealing with corruption are just as hollow as those of his predecessors. But the reality is that the regime has milked the country and the people out of their last rials, and today, the people have nothing more to lose. This is why we’re seeing continued protests across the country despite the regime’s repression, the spread of coronavirus, and dozens of other problems. The regime is playing with corruption by making duplicitous claims about fighting corruption. And it is only a matter of time before the contraption it has created blows up in its own face.

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