Iranian Officials Try To Downplay $3 Billion Corruption Case

Videos and photos surfaced on social media showing people chanting slogans against the government and authorities' incompetence for their mismanagement of the water resources in the province. 

Protesters gathered in front of the governor’s office and some iconic landmarks in the city, carrying placards and empty bottles while security forces – backed by special anti-riot forces -- were trying to disrupt the gatherings. Some clashes were also reported during the police standoff with people. 

The crisis which has seriously affected the everyday lives of the majority of the city’s nearly 600,000 population, has been attributed to the critical depletion of the water in the Ekbatan Dam reservoir, with zero inflows.

The popular protests against the government's inefficiency in water supply have also been reported in the city of Kazeroon (Kazerun) in southwestern Fars province.

Iran’s Energy Minister admitted on Wednesday that the main problem of water tensions in Iran is the government's negligence in building water supply infrastructure, whereas Hamedan’s governor had blamed the farmers for the water crisis.

Earlier in the month, a large group of people in the city of Shahrekord in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari -- a traditionally water-rich region in the Zagros mountains -- held a protest rally after nine days with no drinking water.

In recent years, many cities across the country were scenes of massive protests against the authorities’ mismanagement of water resources or harmful dam building and politically motivated diversion of rivers that have devastated agriculture and drinking water sources, while the Iran has been suffering from drought for at least a decade.

The hardliner paper wrote in an August 23 commentary that "all the claims about the nuclear agreement are lies and no sanctions are going to be lifted as a result of a deal" with Washington.

The Kayhan repeated its own rude rhetoric about the West in this commentary, calling Europe "a dog trained by the United States" and claimed that Europeans have turned to burning logs [as a result of fuel shortage caused by the war in Ukraine] and consuming rotten food [as a result of food shortage for the same reason]."

While parties are still negotiating to revive the 2015 agreement, JCPOA, Kayhan lashed out at its domestic supporters, mainly Iranian reformists, and wrote: "Weren't they saying every day that Iran was suffering a $100 million loss per day as the revival of the JCPOA was delayed? What has the Iranian economy gained after all that hurry to strike a deal?"

The hardliner daily accused the supporters of a deal with the United States of “throwing the country into a bottomless well."

Meanwhile the daily attributed the closure of several Iranian industrial plants to the nuclear deal while Iranian experts have said repeatedly that those firms were shut down after they were confiscated by the government and because inefficient government management pushed them into bankruptcy and closure.

Many politicians and pundits in recent days have argued that a nuclear deal is not a magic wand that will quickly fix Iran’s economic crisis. They pointed out that financial corruption and the government's inefficiency are responsible for up to 80 percent of the economic crisis in Iran and no breakthrough will happen unless those two problems are effectively tackled.

Incidentally, a report published on the same day in Didban Iran website in Tehran noted that more than half of government employees in Iran have been hired based on their connections, adding that more than 45 percent of government employees in Iran are inefficient as they lack the right skills.

Meanwhile, reformist politician Mehdi Ayati told Nameh News website in Tehran on Tuesday that the revival of the JCPOA will definitely have a positive impact on Iran's economy, but added that the agreement should facilitate Iran's ability to economically benefit from it.

In another development, Iran's nuclear Chief Mohammad Eslami said that "Iran will not accept Israel's positions as the agenda of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)." Reacting to safeguard questions raised by the IAEA and European and US negotiators' insistence on the need for Iran to respond to questions about enriched Uranium traces in several locations, Eslami said: "These accusations are not new, and Tehran has been responding to them for 20 years now." But did not say why Iran has failed to convince the IAEA.

In one of the latest developments regarding a possible agreement, Iran's Security Chief Ali Shamkhani told the press in Tehran that the Supreme Council of National Security which he heads, has had no resolution yet about the negotiations. He added that a possible agreement will be first approved by the SCNS before being put to vote at the parliament (Majles).

Attorney Mohammad Moghimi said on Twitter on Wednesday that his former client Farhad Salmanpour Zahir has managed to "escape" from the prison.

“In a bold and clever move, he escaped from Evin prison with a very complex, technical, and stylish act after misleading” intelligence officers -- Moghimi said. 

Salmanpour, who worked at the president's office under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was detained on August 21, 2019, by the intelligence ministry agents without any arrest warrant and was taken to Evin’s 209 ward, where he spent 45 days in solitary confinement. He had been imprisoned many times by the security agencies during the past years.

About two months later, human rights sources reported that Salmanpour was subjected to the most severe torture in order to obtain a forced confession about his relationship with Ruhollah Zam, a dissident journalist who was the director of the Amadnews Telegram channel before he was abducted in Iraq in 2019, and taken to Iran and hanged.

He reportedly faced new charges for informing about the suspicious death of another prisoner, Shahin Naseri.

Jalil Rahimi Jahanabadi, member of the Iranian parliament’s foreign policy and national security committee, told local media that the same people who were tearing up the JCPOA in recent past now completely agree with its revival.

Rahimi was implicitly referring to hardliners who during the presidency of Hassan Rouhani opposed the agreement his government had concluded with world powers in 2015.

The lawmaker said that opposition to the deal was driven by political motives. He retorted that some politicians “did not want the previous government to restore the agreement. They wanted to be the ones to do it.”

Rahimi, a Sunni Muslim and a two-term parliament member, told the former opponents of JCPOA that they have to answer to the people as “why they did that to their livelihood.”

The US left the JCPOA in 2015 and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran.

Tehran began talks in April 2021, and could have reportedly concluded an agreement to revive the deal, but it was delayed until presidential elections in June 2021 when it was all but certain that hardliner Ebrahim Raisi would be elected.

Five months after the election, the new government dominated by the hardliner camp returned to negotiations in Vienna.

In an interview with the government’s official news website IRNA on Tuesday, Mahmoud Salari said "I am not a representative of the artists, I am a representative of the government of the Islamic Republic."

He noted that the artistic department of the ministry is not responsible for artists who seek their own artistic values, adding that the department does not back artists who would act against the policies of the Islamic Republic. 

The government’s money is only for those artists who work in line with the charter of the Islamic arts devised by the founder of the Islamic Republic Rouhollah Khomeini, he elaborated, adding that "anyone who wants to insult the Islamic Republic should take money from the people who ask them to do so."

Films, music and books go through a rigorous censorship process in Iran and often have to change and re-write segments to be accepted by religious-political censors. In Iran’s closed economy, most artistic creations also depend on government financing.

On Saturday, the minister of culture and Islamic guidance Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaili threatened filmmakers and actors with a work ban if they criticize Islamic Republic entities and officials, adding that Iranian films cannot participate in foreign film festivals if they are not authorized to be shown in Iran.

Iran’s Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib also warned government’s critics on Thursday against writing statements and open letters to criticize the current situation in the country.