Reported by PMOI/MEK
April 28, 2019 – Iran regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei controls a financial empire worth an estimated $200 billion, according to a statement issued Friday by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Khamenei alone possess an estimate of $200 billion, while many Iranians languish in poverty due to the dire economic situation in Iran after 40 years of rule by the mullahs, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said in a Facebook post.
The statement also says financial corruption runs rampant from top to bottom in the mullahs’ regime ruling Iran.
Forty years into the clerical regime, while many Iranians suffer from poverty and extreme economic conditions, Khamenei owns assets worth an estimated $200 billion.
According to a Reuters investigative report back in 2013, Khamenei was considered the wealthiest mullah, and one of the wealthiest people on Earth, with over $95 billion assets.
The 2013 Reuters investigative report revealed that a little-known organization, established to supposedly help the poor in Iran, morphed into a business juggernaut worth tens of billions of dollars.
Reuters stated that Khamenei controlled a business empire worth around $95 billion, a sum exceeding the value of his oil-rich nation's annual petroleum exports. The little-known organization, called Setad, is one of the keys to the Iranian leader's enduring power and holding stakes in nearly every sector of the Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.
Setad has built its empire on the systematic seizure of thousands of properties belonging to ordinary Iranians, members of religious minorities, Shiite Muslims, business people and Iranians living abroad, according to the report.
Reuters reporters identified nearly 300 properties that Setad put up for auction in May alone, many worth millions of dollars.
The Reuters report documents how Setad has amassed a giant portfolio of real estate by claiming in Iranian courts, sometimes falsely, that the properties are abandoned. The organization now holds a court-ordered monopoly on taking properties in the name of the supreme leader, and regularly sells the seized properties at auction or seeks to extract payments from the original owners.
Under Khamenei, the organization has expanded its corporate holdings, buying stakes in dozens of Iranian companies, both private and public, with the stated goal of creating an Iranian conglomerate to boost the country’s economic growth.
This is while according to reports, 80% of Iranians suffer from poverty while four percent hold all the wealth in Iran.
Official numbers on the extent of poverty in Iran vary and are usually put at 35%, but according to a member of the parliament, 80% of people now live under the line of poverty in Iran. This seems more precise as the crumbling economy and lack of will by Iranian officials to fix it drive more into poverty every day.
As an increasing number of Iranian companies and manufacturers go bankrupt or have slowed production as a result of inflation and corruption, a high number of workers go unpaid or are completely put aside.
Hedayatollah Khademi, a member of the parliament severely criticized the dire state of the economy and the people’s living conditions in July.
“You have made the Iranian people miserable. You have taken away their respect and confidence. They don’t know what to do due to poverty and desperation. They have resorted to selling their organs including their kidneys due to poverty. Look what you have done to a country that makes up one percent of the global population but has eight percent of the world’s natural resources,” he had said last July.
The recent floods have only added to the problems with at least 500,000 internally displaced, according to the European Commission.
Iranians are extremely angry and say that the regime has done nothing to ease their problems during and after the floods that ravaged almost all of Iran’s provinces.
