پال کلبنیکوف
پال كلبنیكوف (Paul Klebnikov) نویسنده كتاب
معروف "ملا های ملیونر" است كه در ۹ جولای ۲۰۰۴ به طرز ناجوانمردانه ای در بیرون دفتر روزنامه محل كارش در مسكو
ترور و كشته شد.
این تنها خلاصه بخش كمی از تحقیقات
اوست:
در حالی كه بیش از ۹ درصد نفت دنیا و ۱۵ در صد گاز طبیعی
جهان در ایران قرار دارد، ایران باید كشوری ثروتمند باشد، اما درآمد سرانه هفت
درصد كمتر از مقدار آن قبل از انقلاب می باشد. حجم سرمایه های منتقل شده از ایران
به دبی و مناطق امن اقتصادی در حدود سه بیلیون دلار در سال است.
رفسنجانی ها
پس از انقلاب ایران یك برادر رفسنجانی صنایع مس را در دست گرفت،
دیگری كنترل تلویزیون را، برادر زن وی استاندار كرمان شد و پسر عمو (یا پسردایی یا
پسرخاله ، لغت كازین در انگلیسی) صادرات چهارصد میلیون دلاری پسته را قبضه كرد.
پسر و خواهرزاده (یا برادرزاده؛ لغت نفیو در انگلیسی) او؛ در وزارت
نفت پستهای كلیدی دارند، پسر دیگر او مترو را در اختیار دارد كه تا زمان تهیه
گزارش حدود هفتصد میلیون دلار برای آن هزینه شده است. این خانواده از طریق شركت ها
و بنیادهای مختلف عمل كرده و باور بر این است كه یكی از بزرگترین شركت های نفتی
ایران، كارخانه ساخت اتومبیل دوو و یكی از بهترین خطوط هوایی خصوصی ایران را در
دست دارند (علیرغم اینكه خود آنها منكر تصاحب این ثروت ها هستند.) كوچكترین پسر رفسنجانی یاسر، صاحب
باغی سی هكتاری در منطقه فوق مدرن لواسان در همسایگی تهران است كه هر هكتار زمین
در آن منطقه در حدود چهار میلیون دلار معامله میشود. یاسر از كجا این پول را آورده
است؟ او یك تاجر تحصیل كرده بلژیك است و اداره كننده شركتی است كه در زمینه غذای
كودك، آب معدنی و ماشین آلات صنعتی فعالیت دارد.
ساده ترین راه پولدار شدن به قول
سعید لیلاز كه اكنون با یكی از شركتهای اتومبیل سازی همكاری می كند در سالهای
اولیه انقلاب داشتن رابط های لازم به منظور گرفتن مجوز واردات و تبدیل دلار صد و
هفتاد و پنج تومان به هشتصد تومان بود. تخمین او گویای زیانی معادل سه تا پنج
بیلیون دلار در سال به اقتصاد ایران حاصل از این نوع كلاهبرداری قانونی در آن مدت
است.
Paul Klebnikov
Millionaire Mullahs
A looming nuclear threat to the rest of the
world, Iran is robbing its own people of prosperity. But the men at the top are
getting extremely rich.
It’s rumble time in
Tehran. At dozens of intersections in the capital of Iran thousands of students
are protesting on a recent Friday around midnight, as they do nearly every
night, chanting pro-democracy slogans and lighting bonfires on street corners. Residents
of the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods converge in their cars, honking
their horns in raucous support.
Suddenly there’s thunder
in the air. A gang of 30 motorcyclists, brandishing iron bars and clubs, roars
through the stalled traffic. They glare at the drivers, yell threats, thump
cars. Burly and bearded, the bikers yank two men from their auto and pummel
them. Most protesters scatter. Uniformed policemen watch impassively as the
thugs beat the last stragglers.
These bikers are part of
the Hezbollah militia, recruited mostly from the countryside. Iran’s ruling
mullahs roll them out whenever they need to intimidate their opponents. The
Islamic Republic is a strange dictatorship. As it moves to repress growing
opposition to clerical rule, the regime relies not on soldiers or uniformed
police (many of whom sympathize with the protesters) but on the bullies of
Hezbollah and the equally thuggish Revolutionary Guards. The powers that be
claim to derive legitimacy from Allah but remain on top with gangsterlike
methods of intimidation, violence and murder.
Who controls today’s
Iran? Certainly not Mohammad Khatami, the twice-elected moderate president, or
the reformist parliament. Not even the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei–a
stridently anti-American but unremarkable cleric plucked from the religious
ranks 14 years ago to fill the shoes of his giant predecessor, Ayatollah
Khomeini–is fully in control. The real power is a handful of clerics and their
associates who call the shots behind the curtain and have gotten very rich in
the process.
The economy bears more
than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck
of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign
investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized,
but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car
and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes
Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations,
controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation
executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their
supporters.
Iran has other lethal
secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international
eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former
ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship
run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances
terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is
dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow
army of enforcers.
Ironically, the man most
adept at manipulating this hidden power structure is one of Iran’s best-known
characters–Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been named an ayatollah, or
religious leader. He was the speaker of parliament and Khomeini’s right-hand
man in the 1980s, president of Iran from 1989 to 1997 and is now chairman of the
powerful Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between the clerical
establishment and parliament. Rafsanjani has more or less run the Islamic
Republic for the past 24 years.
He played it smart,
aligning himself in the 1960s with factions led by Ayatollah Khomeini, then
becoming the go-to guy after the revolution. A hard-liner ideologically,
Rafsanjani nonetheless has a pragmatic streak. He convinced Khomeini to end the
Iran-Iraq war and broke Iran’s international isolation by establishing trade relations
with the Soviet Union, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In the
1990s he restarted Iran’s nuclear program.
He is also the father of
Iran’s “privatization” program. During his presidency the stock market was
revived, some government companies were sold to insiders, foreign trade was
liberalized and the oil sector was opened up to private companies. Most of the
good properties and contracts, say dissident members of Iran’s Chamber of
Commerce, ended up in the hands of mullahs, their associates and, not least,
Rafsanjani’s family, who rose from modest origins as pistachio farmers. “They
were not rich people, so they worked hard and always tried to help their
relatives get ahead,” remembers Reza, a historian who declines to use his last
name and who studied with one of Rafsanjani’s brothers at Tehran University in
the early 1970s. “When they were in university, two brothers earned money on
the side tutoring theological students and preparing their exam papers.”
The 1979 revolution
transformed the Rafsanjani clan into commercial pashas. One brother headed the
country’s largest copper mine; another took control of the state-owned TV
network; a brother-in-law became governor of Kerman province, while a cousin
runs an outfit that dominates Iran’s $400 million pistachio export business; a
nephew and one of Rafsanjani’s sons took key positions in the Ministry of Oil;
another son heads the Tehran Metro construction project (an estimated $700
million spent so far). Today, operating through various foundations and front
companies, the family is also believed to control one of Iran’s biggest oil
engineering companies, a plant assembling Daewoo automobiles, and Iran’s best
private airline (though the Rafsanjanis insist they do not own these assets).
None of this sits well
with the populace, whose per capita income is $1,800 a year. The gossip on the
street, going well beyond the observable facts, has the Rafsanjanis stashing
billions of dollars in bank accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg; controlling
huge swaths of waterfront in Iran’s free economic zones on the Persian Gulf;
and owning whole vacation resorts on the idyllic beaches of Dubai, Goa and
Thailand.
But not much of the
criticism makes its way into print. One journalist who dared to investigate Rafsanjani’s
secret dealings and his alleged role in extrajudicial killings of dissidents is
now languishing in jail. He’s lucky. Iranian politics can be deadly. Five years
ago Tehran was rocked by murders of journalists and anticorruption activists;
some were beheaded, others mutilated.
Some of the family’s
wealth is out there for all to see. Rafsanjani’s youngest son, Yaser, owns a
30-acre horse farm in the superfashionable Lavasan neighborhood of north
Tehran, where land goes for over $4 million an acre. Just where did Yaser get
his money? A Belgian-educated businessman, he runs a large export-import firm
that includes baby food, bottled water and industrial machinery.
Until a few years ago
the simplest way to get rich quick was through foreign-currency trades. Easy,
if you could get greenbacks at the subsidized import rate of 1,750 rials to the
dollar and resell them at the market rate of 8,000 to the dollar. You needed
only the right connections for an import license. “I estimate that, over a
period of ten years, Iran lost $3 billion to $5 billion annually from this kind
of exchange-rate fraud,” says Saeed Laylaz, an economist, now with Iran’s
biggest carmaker. “And the lion’s share of that went to about 50 families.”
One of the families
benefiting from the foreign trade system was the Asgaroladis, an old Jewish
clan of bazaar traders, who converted to Islam several generations ago.
Asadollah Asgaroladi exports pistachios, cumin, dried fruit, shrimp and caviar,
and imports sugar and home appliances; his fortune is estimated by Iranian
bankers to be some $400 million. Asgaroladi had a little help from his older
brother, Habibollah, who, as minister of commerce in the 1980s, was in charge
of distributing lucrative foreign-trade licenses. (He was also a counterparty
to commodities trader and then-fugitive Marc Rich, who helped Iran bypass
U.S.-backed sanctions.)
The other side of Iran’s economy belongs to the Islamic
foundations, which account for 10% to 20% of the nation’s GDP–$115 billion last
year. Known asbonyads, the best-known of these outfits were
established from seized property and enterprises by order of Ayatollah Khomeini
in the first weeks of his regime. Their mission was to redistribute to the
impoverished masses the “illegitimate” wealth accumulated before the revolution
by “apostates” and “blood-sucking capitalists.” And, for a decade or so, the
foundations shelled out money to build low-income housing and health clinics.
But since Khomeini’s death in 1989 they have increasingly forsaken their social
welfare functions for straightforward commercial activities.
Until recently they were
exempt from taxes, import duties and most government regulation. They had
access to subsidized foreign currency and low-interest loans from state-owned
banks. And they were not accountable to the Central Bank, the Ministry of
Finance or any other government institution. Formally, they are under the
jurisdiction of the Supreme Leader; effectively, they operate without any
oversight, answerable only to Allah.
According to Shiite
Muslim tradition, devout businessmen are expected to donate 20% of profits to
their local mosques, which use the money to help the poor. By contrast, many
bonyads seem like rackets, extorting money from entrepreneurs. Besides the
biggest national outfits, almost every Iranian town has its own bonyad,
affiliated with local mullahs. “Many small businessmen complain that as soon as
you start to make some money, the leading mullah will come to you and ask for a
contribution to his local charity,” says an opposition economist, who declines
to give his name. “If you refuse, you will be accused of not being a good
Muslim. Some witnesses will turn up to testify that they heard you insult the
Prophet Mohammad, and you will be thrown in jail.”
Other charities resemble
multinational conglomerates. The Mostazafan & Jambazan Foundation
(Foundation for the Oppressed and War Invalids) is the second-largest
commercial enterprise in the country, behind the state-owned National Iranian
Oil Co. Until recently it was run by a man named Mohsen Rafiqdoost. The son of
a vegetable-and-fruit merchant at the Tehran bazaar, Rafiqdoost got his big
break in 1979, when he was chosen to drive Ayatollah Khomeini from the airport
after his triumphal return from exile in Paris.
Khomeini made him
Minister of the Revolutionary Guards to quash internal dissent and smuggle in
weapons for the Iran-Iraq war. In 1989, when Rafsanjani became president,
Rafiqdoost gained control of the Mostazafan Foundation, which employs up to
400,000 workers and has assets that in all probability exceed $10 billion.
Theoretically the
Mostazafan Foundation is a social welfare organization. By 1996 it began taking
government funds to cover welfare disbursements; soon it plans to spin off its
social responsibilities altogether, leaving behind a purely commercial
conglomerate owned by–whom? That is not clear. Why does this foundation exist?
“I don’t know–ask Mr. Rafiqdoost,” says Abbas Maleki, a foreign policy adviser
to Ayatollah Rafsanjani.
A picture emerges from one
Iranian businessman who used to handle the foreign trade deals for one of the
big foundations. Organizations like the Mostazafan serve as giant cash boxes,
he says, to pay off supporters of the mullahs, whether they’re thousands of
peasants bused in to attend religious demonstrations in Tehran or Hezbollah
thugs who beat up students. And, not least, the foundations serve as cash cows
for their managers.
“It usually works like
this,” explains this businessman. “Some foreigner comes in, proposes a deal to
the foundation head. The big boss says: ‘Fine. I agree. Work out the details with my administrator.’ So the
foreigner goes to see the administrator, who tells him: ‘You know that we have two economies
here–official and unofficial. You have to be part of the unofficial economy if
you want to be successful. So, you have to deposit the following amount into
the following bank account abroad and then the deal will go forward.’”
Today Rafiqdoost heads
up the Noor Foundation, which owns apartment blocks and makes an estimated $200
million importing pharmaceuticals, sugar and construction materials. He is
quick to downplay his personal wealth. “I am just a normal person, with normal
wealth,” he says. Then, striking a Napoleonic pose, he adds: “But if Islam is
threatened, I will become big again.”
Implication: He has
access to a secret reservoir of money that can be tapped when the need arises.
That may have been what Ayatollah Rafsanjani had in mind when he declared
recently that the Islamic Republic needed to keep large funds in reserve. But
who is to determine when Islam is in danger?
As minister of the
Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, Rafiqdoost played a key role in sponsoring
Hezbollah in Lebanon–which kidnapped foreigners, hijacked airplanes, set off
car bombs, trafficked in heroin and pioneered the use of suicide bombers.
According to Gregory Sullivan, spokesman for the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau at
the U.S. State Department, the foundations are the perfect vehicles to carry
out Iran’s shadow foreign policy. Whenever suspicion of complicity in a
terrorist incident turns to Iran, the Tehran government has denied involvement.
State Department officials suspect that such operations may be sponsored by one
of the foundations and semiautonomous units of the Revolutionary Guards.
Iran’s foundations are a
law unto themselves. The largest “charity” (at least in terms of real estate
holdings) is the centuries-old Razavi Foundation, charged with caring for
Iran’s most revered shrine–the tomb of Reza, the Eighth Shiite Imam, in the
northern city of Mashhad. It is run by one of Iran’s leading hard-line mullahs,
Ayatollah Vaez-Tabasi, who prefers to stay out of the public eye but emerges
occasionally to urge death to apostates and other opponents of the clerical
regime.
The Razavi Foundation
owns vast tracts of urban real estate all across Iran, as well as hotels,
factories, farms and quarries. Its assets are impossible to value with any
precision, since the foundation has never released an inventory of its
holdings, but Iranian economists speak of a net asset value of $15 billion or
more. The foundation also receives generous contributions from the millions of
pilgrims who visit the Mashhad shrine each year.
What happens to annual
revenues estimated in the hundreds of millions–perhaps billions–of dollars? Not
all of it goes to cover the maintenance costs of mosques, cemeteries, religious
schools and libraries. Over the past decade the foundation has bought new
businesses and properties, established investment banks (together with
investors from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) and financed big
foreign trade deals.
The driving force behind
the commercialization of the Razavi Foundation is Ayatollah Tabasi’s son,
Naser, who was put in charge of the Sarakhs Free Trade Zone, on the border with
the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. In the 1990s the foundation poured
hundreds of millions of dollars into this project, funding a rail link between
Iran and Turkmenistan, new highways, an international airport, a hotel and
office buildings.
Then it all went wrong.
In July 2001 Naser Tabasi was dismissed as director of the Free Trade Zone. Two
months later he was arrested and charged with fraud in connection with a
Dubai-based company called Al-Makasib. The details remain murky, but four
months ago the General Court of Tehran acquitted him.
Iran’s most
distinguished senior clerics are disgusted by the mullahcrats. Ayatollah Taheri,
Friday prayer leader of the city of Isfahan, resigned in protest earlier this
year. “When I hear that some of the privileged progeny and special people, some
of whom even don cloaks and turbans, are competing amongst themselves to amass
the most wealth,” he said, “I am drenched with the sweat of shame.”
Meanwhile the clerical
elite has mismanaged the nation into senseless poverty. With 9% of the world’s
oil and 15% of its natural gas, Iran should be a very rich country. It has a
young, educated population and a long tradition of international commerce. But
per capita income today is 7% below what it was before the revolution. Iranian
economists estimate capital flight (to Dubai and other safe havens) at up to $3
billion a year.
No wonder so many students
turn to the streets in protest. The dictatorship has been robbing them of their
future.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Department
of Labor; Atieh Bahar Consulting; Forbes estimates.
Discontent
Unveiled Disaffected, denied
opportunity and just plain bored, Iran’s youth have taken their frustrations
with the clerics’ regime to the streets.
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