Iran’s Chief Banker Justifies Measures To Pocket People’s Cash Currency
The Islamic Republic's chief banker says strict measures recently introduced on the banking system are aimed at curbing capital flight, claiming they follow international norms.
The Islamic Republic's chief banker says strict measures recently introduced on the banking system are aimed at curbing capital flight, claiming they follow international norms.
Mohammad-Reza Farzin, the governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), said on state TV Monday night that "all the countries of the world have regulations to prevent capital flight, and capital flight means that you give rials and receive a foreign currency, and it doesn't matter if you keep this currency at home or, for example, go to Turkey and buy a house with it.”
Farzin avoided issues of transparency, he claimed people can do whatever they want with their money if it is not illegal or considered laundering. To have control over the people’s money, the Islamic Republic has recently announced regulations that push people to open foreign currency accounts in its notoriously corrupt, if not bankrupt banks in Iran instead of getting the foreign currency in cash.
Farzin said pushing people to have long-term foreign currency accounts is a measure to control the currency market, but the owners of these accounts cannot withdraw deposits in the foreign currency and only can get the equivalent in almost worthless rials. On the other hand, Farzin has said that the CBI does not consider the exchange rate to be at the actual rate at which people are buying and selling currencies in the market, and that the government plans to have a cap on the rates. For example, the rate that Farzin had announced for the exchange of dollars is about half of the exchange rate at the market at about 280,000 rials for one dollar, while the current rate is about 510,000 rials.
The cash-strapped regime has been unable to access a large portion of its export revenues due to international sanctions, and has been eying measures to grab money kept by the public in safety deposit boxes or at homes. In April 2022, the country’s Headquarters for Combating Smuggling of Goods and Currency announced that the maximum limit for keeping foreign currencies is $10,000 or its equivalent in other currencies. For any amount more than this limit, people should apply for special permits.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Farzin referred to a suspicious bank heist last year, the biggest in recent history and the shadiest in nature as robbers broke only into safety deposit boxes and were arrested in a matter of days. Farzin said that according to the information obtained from the robbery as well as the data from other safety deposit boxes throughout the country, about $15-16 billion dollars are kept in boxes.
In June 2022, thieves broke into at least 200 to 250 safety deposit boxes in the central Tehran branch of Iran’s largest bank – the state-owned Bank Melli (National Bank). Apparently, the robbers gained access from an adjacent building during a two-day holiday. Four days after the heist, police displayed recovered money and gold and announced the arrest of nearly 30 people allegedly involved in the large bank heist in Tehran. The surprisingly quick reaction and arrests by the police raised eyebrows with many seeing it as an ‘inside job’. In February, Iran’s judiciary said 20 people involved in the robbery have been released on bail.
A few hours before Iran’s chief banker went on state television, a large group of the victims of the burglary held a gathering in front of the bank and protested "10 months of patience is enough, return our property".
In an exclusive interview published Monday by Tasnim news agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, Ambassador Chang Hua spoke about the reestablishment of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the US troops in the region, and prospects of ditching the dollar in bilateral transactions among other things.
No Chinese media or Iranian media released a transcript of the interview, therefore Iran International cannot independently verify the readout published by the IRGC outlet.
Throughout the interview, Chang used every opportunity to gloat over Beijing’s role in the rapprochement between the arch-rivals, the Islamic Republic and the Al Saud and also reiterating that the US is in decline.
The long-term strategy for long-term peace and stability in the world is to take a new security path with dialogue instead of confrontation, and a win-win policy instead of a zero-sum strategy, the Chines diplomat said.
The talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Beijing have provided new examples and ideas for solving global security issues, he was quoted as saying, promising that China will continue to do its best to provide necessary support to Iran and Saudi Arabia and help promote security and stability in the Middle East.
The United States and Western countries make the best use of their hegemony of public opinion, and manipulate contentious issues through deceptive propaganda, he said, claiming that continuous interventions in the Middle East is their tactic to maintain their hegemony.
Chang said that “the Beijing agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia” was welcomed by the international community but Washington accused China of “entering the Middle East for energy,” which show the evil intentions of the US. “Foreign interference is an important factor that weakens the security and stability of the Middle East... The US has committed serious human rights violations and many other crimes in the region, which has caused permanent and irreparable damage to the countries and people of the region,” Tasnim quoted Chang as saying.
He also urged the international community, especially influential countries outside the region, to respect the sovereignty of the countries of the Middle East and not to interfere in their internal affairs.
“As a good friend of the Middle East countries, China has no personal interest in the region, and has always been committed to the settlement of hot political issues,” he claimed, according to Tasnim.
Following the China-brokered deal to restore ties, the foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia met in Beijing for the first formal meeting in more than seven years on April 6. After years of hostility that fueled conflicts across the Middle East, Tehran and Riyadh agreed to end their diplomatic rift and re-open embassies in a major deal facilitated by China last month.
Critics in the US have blamed the Biden Administration for pushing Saudi Arabia toward China by pursuing the restoration of the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran and losing the trust of Saudi leaders, as the great power in the region. The US believes China has a role to play in telling Iran to end its “destabilizing activities,” the State Department said as Iran’s president visited Beijing in mid-February.
However, as Iran moves closer to Russia and China, leading Iranian lawmakers and pundits have warned the government against over-reliance on Moscow and Beijing.
Earlier in the month, a moderate Iranian news website claimed that the Islamic Republic’s frozen assets in China are worth between $22 and $30 billion, suggesting that amid US sanctions even Tehran’s close ally is not willing to pay back its debts.
Ali Nesaei also said managers in both public and private sector are responsible for enforcing the hijab rules in the workplace. “If this happens in parks it is the municipality that is responsible. The same applies to universities,” he said at a press briefing while holding the police responsible for controlling the streets and businesses.
Nesaei added that civil servants will be referred to disciplinary committees even if they shed the hijab outside work and that in accordance with article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code they will initially have to pay a cash fine of over 10m rials ($20 or one fifth of minimum wage) for the first time they are charged with violating the hijab law. Vehicles could also be impounded from one to twenty days, if occupants are seen violating the dress code, he said.
Further infringements will entail more cash fines and deprivation from certain “privileges”, he said, referring to threats of seizing drivers’ licenses, passports, etc.
On Friday chief of Iran's law enforcement, Ahmadreza Radan, said that from April 15 police will use CCTV and facial recognition technology to document violation of hijab rules and provide the evidence to the judiciary for legal action against violators.
Radan said after only one warning, vehicles of those who remove their hijab in their vehicles will be “electronically impounded”, clamped on the street, or taken to a parking, while businesses, including restaurants, malls and catering halls will be shut down.
Hardliners keep insisting that most Iranians agree with hijab rules. “It’s good to [announce that] the hijabless will be photographed and that eventually they will be deprived of the privileges they have in the country…and punishments will be meted out to them. They cannot complain in the future because they have been warned,” said lawmaker Ahmad Karimi-Esfahani Monday while claiming that 90 percent of Iranian agree with hijab rules.
Encouraged by some clerics such as Ahmad Alamolhoda, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative in Khorasan-e Razavi Province, vigilantes have been attacking hijabless women. Earlier this month, a video of a man pouring a tub of yogurt on the head of a woman in Mashhad went viral on social media and outraged many. Another video has emerged that shows a man, accompanied by several other men and women, beating a woman with his prayer beads.
A man beating a hijabless woman with his prayer beads, apparently after a quarrel over hijab.
“The whistle warning has been blown about the consequences of polarizing [the society over hijab] and pitching people against each other, but hardliners are still not listening,” reformist Shargh Daily said in a commentary Monday.
It appears that conservatives are also aware of the consequences but have been unable to prevent hardliner regime loyalists from going too far to avoid instances such as those seen in the videos of physical assaults that could be embarrassing and backfire against the regime.
In a commentary Saturday, the Basirat weekly of Khamenei’s political representative in the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) admitted that too much emphasis on the issue could potentially cause people’s confrontation with the regime while accusing the opposition and its media of using hijab controversies to polarize the society and create unrest.
Hijab has been a very controversial issue in Iran for nearly ninety years. The founder of Iran's Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, banned the hijab in January 1939 despite the strong opposition by clerics but a few years later under his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi the ban fell into oblivion.
Only five months after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, then leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini banned hijablessness in government offices. The ban gradually spread to the entire society within the next two years.
Khabar Online, wrote in an April 9 report that the Jalili brothers are determined to go from where they are in positions of power to the Iranian parliament (Majles) next year. Khabar Online added that all those who were in charge of the state television before were also political activists linked to major political groups.
The state television's current chief, Payman Jebelli appointed Vahid Jalili as his acting deputy during the first days after he got his mandate from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who supervises the organization and keeps an eye on the hiring and firing of key officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), which is the main tool for propagating his hardline ideas.
Saeed Jalili is a key figure in the ultra-conservative Paydari Party, which has a solid majority in the current parliament, but does not control the Speaker’s seat, which is occupied by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (Qalibaf), a relative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
According to Khabar Online, it is not simply a matter of winning a majority in parliament, but Jalilis could be eying the Speaker's seat at the Majles, with the elder brother Saeed hoping to knock Ghalibaf out of the much-coveted seat.
Jalili, who had a dismal record as nuclear negotiator more than a decade ago, is squarely opposed to reviving the JCPOA nuclear deal with the West.
If they ever win the Majles, they would be determined to unseat nearly all of Iran's traditional conservatives from their positions of power and create some sort of monopoly for their likeminded ultraconservatives. In the process, it is clear that they would do their best to block any reformist or independent from getting elected.
Since several years before his appointment Vahid Jalili, better known as a vigilante group leader, tried to make his political views known by writing open letters to the heads of the IRIB and its political director Hossein Mohammadi, a confidant of Ayatollah Khamenei.
In those letters, the young Jalili often criticized the state media's behavior and suggested more hardline policies to govern media outlets, particularly TV channels.
Saeed Jalili, is thought to be steering the Raisi administration from the passenger seat, while avoiding the driver's seat and the responsibilities that comes with it, not only has planted his brother as the IRIB's acting deputy chief, his niece Alireza Khodabakhshi, is IRIB's point of person for everything relating to elections.
This gives Jalili a unique opportunity to determine who is to be groomed and promoted on the national TV and who is to be introduced to the nation as a black sheep through public opinion engineering and news manipulation.
Thanks to Jalili's lack of expertise, the IRIB has lost a lot of its audience during the past two years as Jebelli has admitted in his recent interviews. However, this does not affect Jalilis and likeminded politicians' electability because the minority who watch IRIB's political preaching are the same minority that have taken part in extremely low-turnout elections in 2020 and 2021, which brought an inefficient parliament and notoriously incompetent President Ebrahim Raisi to power.
The majority of Iranians who are not represented among the hand-picked candidates are unlikely to take part in any election. Even the power-hungry reformists have said that they would not take part if their conditions, including due representation, are not met.
Saeed Jalili is rumored to be running his shadow government, which is now mainly based at the IRIB and is determined to use the platform to catapult himself, his brother, and their political allies to take full control of the parliament (Majles) next March.
Khabar Online, opined that the Jalilis' upper hand at the state TV violates the rights of other likely election candidates and further narrows the voters' choices. However, the nation has made its choice during the 2022 nationwide protests and that is: Going their own separate ways and defying the rules of the game as defined by Iran's hardliners.