Iran International
Donald Trump’s maximum pressure is usually scored by counting tankers and tracking the rial, but Iran’s budget points to a deeper cost: more than $80 billion in NIOC bank debt and sovereign-fund arrears, repeatedly deferred as Iranians shoulder the burden.
On August 5, a state bank froze the accounts of the National Iranian Oil Company, NIOC, over about $1 billion owed to the sovereign wealth fund, two years past due. A separate case was already running: a $1.5 billion tax assessment the company says it simply cannot pay. Enforcement on that one stopped only when the presidency intervened.
The episode matters because the law shielding the company is also where its condition is recorded. NIOC publishes no audited accounts, and Iran's budget shows state companies only in aggregate, leaving its debt to be reconstructed from budget provisions and disclosures by other state institutions.
This year's budget sets the amount of NIOC debt to the central bank and commercial banks being deferred at 55 billion euros, about $63.5 billion, covering principal and interest on financing for upstream oil and gas development. It appears as a single sentence at the bottom of a table in which every other figure is in rials or percentages, renewed every year since 2019.
Iran's sovereign wealth fund, the National Development Fund, has separately said NIOC is its largest debtor, with $17 billion in unpaid loans.
Those two categories alone amount to more than $80 billion. No single official document presents them as one consolidated NIOC debt figure.
Iran's entire general budget this year converts to roughly $37 billion at the open-market rate. For scale, the deferred bank debt alone is about 1.7 times what the government plans to spend in a year.
That burden grows without anyone borrowing another dollar. The debt is in foreign currency, and the rial has fallen from about 900,000 to the dollar in early 2025 to nearly 2 million today, a slide President Trump celebrated in August as his administration "destroying Iran's currency." Each step down makes the same $63 billion heavier against NIOC's rial costs and the state's domestic revenues.
That burden grows in rial terms without anyone borrowing another dollar. The debt is in foreign currency, and the rial has fallen from about 900,000 to the dollar in early 2025 to nearly 2 million today, a slide President Trump celebrated in August as his administration "destroying Iran's currency.” Each step down increases the rial value of the same $63 billion obligation and makes it larger relative to the state's domestic revenues.
Maximum pressure is usually scored from the outside: barrels tracked leaving the Persian Gulf, the rial's slide, the lengthening sanctions lists. By that scorecard the campaign is working.
A clearer measure is the condition of the company at the center of the sanctioned trade, and by that measure the campaign has worked more completely than the scorecard shows. The pressure did not stop Iran's oil. It changed the terms of the business, and the new terms have broken the company that produces it, in every sense but the accounting one.
The business model was set at the top. After the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, Ali Khamenei told officials not to leave the economy waiting on "decisions to be made by others." The objective instead was to plan with the sanctions in place and, in his formulation, to neutralize them.
The oil ministry's version of neutralization was to keep production alive with domestic contractors, the Revolutionary Guard's companies among them. On its own terms, that part worked. Output that had fallen below 2 million barrels a day in 2020, the lowest in almost four decades by American government estimates, was rebuilt to about 3.6 million by mid-2024, a recovery the oil minister boasted of publicly.
Selling those barrels was another matter.
"We have unofficial or unconventional sales, all of which are secret," then-oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said in 2019, "because if they are made known America would immediately stop them." His deputy called it the grey market.
In practice, that meant selling at sanctions-driven discounts that have varied widely over time, reaching $10 to $15 a barrel below Brent through 2024 and 2025, particularly to China's independent refiners; using a shadow fleet, ship-to-ship transfers and obscured vessel identities; relabeling Iranian crude as originating elsewhere; and paying intermediaries to keep the chain moving. China has at times taken roughly 90 percent of Iran's exported crude.
Payment itself became another layer of the sanctions trade. Iranian oil proceeds have been trapped or restricted in foreign banking systems, while other sales have been settled through barter or in currencies that are difficult to repatriate freely.
India created a rupee payment mechanism for Iranian crude in 2019, and the channel stalled the same year when Indian purchases stopped. Roughly $6 billion in Iranian oil proceeds frozen in South Korea were eventually transferred to restricted accounts in Qatar as part of the 2023 prisoner exchange.
Every additional discount, commission and restriction reduces what reaches Iran. NIOC's statutory share of crude and condensate export proceeds is set at 14.5 percent, so lower realized export revenue narrows the company's own take as well.
The difference between what the model earned and what production cost was covered on credit, in foreign currency, from the central bank, state banks and the sovereign wealth fund, with parliament's authorization.
By January 2019 the state knew in writing that the arrangement was not paying for itself. The parliament's research arm reported that NIOC, then about $50 billion in debt on its own count of the previous year, could not repay what it owed. The party line continued anyway: the same parliament approved fresh lending in the same budget, and two months later wrote the first deferral into law.
The dollar figures were tracked for two more years, to about $60 billion in March 2020 and about $70 billion in March 2021. Then that series went quiet.
The liabilities themselves did not vanish from the record. Two years later the Economy Ministry put NIOC's debts for 2021 at 1,683 trillion tomans, the largest of any state company in Iran, ahead of Bank Sepah and Bank Melli. At the exchange rate of the day, that is the same $60 to $65 billion the dollar series had been reporting.
What disappeared was the ability to follow it: a comparable figure, year by year, in the currency the money was owed in. The largest corporate debt in Iran's history was reduced to one renewable sentence that for six years carried no number at all. When a number finally surfaced this February, it settled what the silence had left open. The bank debt did not go away. It was rolled forward.
The meter still runs, though not at one rate. The sovereign fund's published terms for foreign-currency oil and gas facilities are 3.5 percent for the fund plus 2.5 for the agent bank, 6 percent all-in. On the $17 billion it is owed, that alone is close to $1 billion a year, almost exactly the size of the claim that froze the company's accounts in August.
The central bank has never published its contract rate, so the future cost can only be estimated. If even a 4 percent rate were applied to the $63 billion outstanding balance, it would add more than $2.5 billion in interest over a year; at the sovereign fund's 6 percent rate, the figure would approach $3.8 billion.
What the budget does establish is that the deferred bank debt already consists of principal and interest. The cost of carrying the old debt has become part of the debt.
For comparison, $1.5 billion in foreign currency is allocated for medicine this year, in a spring when pharmacy prices jumped several hundred percent, cancer and dialysis drugs ran short, and officials blamed scarce foreign currency. Depending on the rates applied to NIOC’s different debts, the annual interest burden could exceed that amount by several billion dollars.
An Iranian who misses a single loan installment pays the contract rate plus a 6-point penalty. The oil company's interest simply accrues, uncollected, year after year. A deferral, in the end, is a bet that a better year is coming, one with a surplus large enough to settle old bills. The Islamic Republic has been promising that better year that is yet to come for forty-seven years.
Because the loans are neither collected nor written off, the central bank and the state banks carry them as sound assets, the same accounting that keeps Iran's insolvent banks upright. When those banks come up short, they overdraw at the central bank, and that is where base money is created.
The transmission is not mechanical, but it is the route by which a single failed lender, Bank Ayandeh, accounted for about a quarter of the growth in Iran's monetary base in 2022-23. The bill reaches Iranians as inflation: the tax no one votes on, taking its largest share from the poorest.
Fifteen years of records say NIOC could not pay when conditions were merely bad. With its fields bombed and its exports blockaded, repayment is beyond reach in any scenario.
And the pressure is still tightening. On August 13, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who runs the Economic Fury campaign against the Islamic Republic, promised measures "like have never been seen in the history of the economic isolation of a country," on top of a blockade meant to keep anything from moving in or out of Iranian ports. Whatever they turn out to be, they are aimed at the only revenue that could ever service this debt.
Nor does the optimistic case rescue the company. Even a full lifting of sanctions would not change the arithmetic quickly, because a company with damaged fields and war-hit infrastructure would have to borrow more before it could export more.
Maximum pressure set the terms of this downfall, but the decisive choices were Tehran's: to keep pumping at any margin, to stop publishing a comparable foreign-currency debt figure after 2021, and to push the bill forward one year at a time.
The company that once symbolized Iran's oil wealth was not felled by a rival or a market. It was sacrificed, quietly, by its own state, to the nuclear program and the regional ambitions that brought the sanctions, and to the business model built to outlast them, and the receipt is one sentence long, perpetually renewed every year.
The options include imposing a daily cap on supplies to filling stations, tightening vehicle quotas and allowing additional gasoline to be sold at market rates, or transferring fuel allocations from vehicles to individuals and permitting citizens to trade them.
No proposal has been approved, and the government has not announced any immediate change to subsidized gasoline prices.
Esmail Saghab-Esfahani, a vice president and head of Iran's Strategic Energy Policy and Management Organization, outlined the three scenarios on state television and said the public would be informed before any decision was implemented.
Daily supplies could be capped
Under the first proposal, existing prices would remain unchanged, but filling stations nationwide would receive a combined 121 million liters of gasoline per day.
Saghab-Esfahani said pumps would stop operating once that amount had been sold, effectively imposing a nationwide daily supply ceiling without formally increasing prices.
The second proposal would divide the same 121 million liters among registered vehicles through a stricter quota system. Motorists exceeding their allocation would have to purchase additional gasoline at an unsubsidized market rate.
The third option would transfer gasoline quotas from vehicles to individuals. Every citizen would receive about 30 liters per month, whether or not they owned a vehicle, and could use or sell the allocation.
Around 30 million liters per day would separately be reserved for public transportation, conventional taxis and ride-hailing services under that proposal, in an effort to prevent fare increases.
Saghab-Esfahani said the third plan would be accompanied by a three-year program to electrify 400,000 motorcycles, convert 130,000 pickup trucks to natural gas and add 7,300 buses. He did not explain how the program would be financed or provide a detailed implementation schedule.
Conflicting production figures
In his latest remarks, Saghab-Esfahani put daily gasoline production at about 121 million liters and consumption at around 135 million, implying a shortfall of approximately 14 million liters per day.
Tehran-based news website Rouydad24 cited earlier remarks by the official that put production at about 112 million liters. The reason for the nine-million-liter discrepancy was not explained and may reflect different reporting periods or production conditions.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has said Iran spent about $6 billion importing gasoline during the Iranian year that ended March 20, 2026. Officials say falling revenue, limited access to foreign currency and obstacles affecting import routes have made that approach increasingly difficult.
Kerman plan halted before launch
The debate intensified after authorities abruptly announced and then suspended a plan to sell gasoline consumed beyond existing quotas at a sharply higher rate in southern Kerman province.
The plan was halted hours before it was due to begin following talks between Kerman’s governor and national officials. Provincial authorities said the existing system would remain in place while the proposal underwent further review.
Neither the Oil Ministry nor the government disclosed the legal basis for the plan or how the new price had been calculated. Officials also did not clarify whether Kerman had been selected for a local anti-smuggling initiative or as a test for wider changes.
Legacy of the 2019 protests
Gasoline pricing remains among the most politically sensitive issues in Iran.
An overnight nationwide price increase in November 2019 triggered protests in more than 100 cities. Rights groups documented hundreds of deaths in the ensuing crackdown, during which authorities imposed a near-total internet shutdown.
Pezeshkian promised during his 2024 presidential campaign that gasoline prices would not be increased without public consent and that more fuel-efficient vehicles would be made available before any increase.
Government officials have said no immediate price rise is planned, but all three proposals now under consideration would restrict consumption or redistribute subsidies.
The proposals leave the government seeking to address a growing supply deficit without an abrupt policy change that could further strain household finances and renew public anger over gasoline prices.
The major corruption network involved in the sale of Iranian oil has been operating within the Islamic Republic’s Intelligence Ministry, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The network was built around trusted intermediaries, known in Iran as “trustees,” who were given oil to sell as part of efforts to circumvent sanctions and were expected to return the proceeds to the state.
Iran International’s investigation found that the nine included the relatives of senior current and former officials, including a son of Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei and the sons-in-law of two former intelligence ministers.
On August 9, the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA), quoting Hossein Samsami, a member of parliament’s Economic Committee, named one of the trustees who he said had failed to return Iran’s oil revenue: Hossein Aghayari.
A day later, ILNA provided further details, saying Aghayari was born in 1982 and operated in Tehran using Iranian and Afghan passports. It said he had purchased 40 Iranian oil tankers, taken delivery of 90 million barrels of oil, sold it on the market and failed to return the proceeds.
Aghayari has been based in the United Arab Emirates since before the start of the 40-day war. Two oil-industry sources told Iran International that five months ago, he stayed for several days at the Ritz hotel in London using a Dominican passport.
According to the sources, Aghayari’s name and details of his activities were deliberately provided to Iran’s domestic media as part of a security operation intended to conceal the identities of the principal figures in a much larger network of Intelligence Ministry trustees.
The sources identify the leader of the network as a senior Intelligence Ministry official known as Shayan, the ministry’s director-general for fuel and energy. He was dismissed 10 days ago and, according to three sources, is expected to be arrested.
The sources say the group, known as the Shayan Network, was responsible for about $11 billion in oil-sale proceeds not being returned to the state.
How the network operated
Since the administration of former President Ebrahim Raisi took office, Iran’s budget laws have allowed executive agencies and state, military and Social Security pension funds, in coordination with the Oil Ministry, to receive Iranian crude oil and gas condensate for sale as part of efforts to circumvent sanctions and return the proceeds to Iran.
The individuals and companies entrusted with selling the oil and transferring the revenue are commonly known in Iran’s political and economic terminology as “trustees.”
The administration of President Masoud Pezeshkian has continued to use similar mechanisms for oil sales.
According to Iran International’s sources, several large patronage networks emerged around the system, including one operating within the Intelligence Ministry through the cooperation of three figures.
One was Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad, who previously headed the Oil Ministry’s Fuel Supply Oversight Headquarters.
The other two, according to the sources, were the principal organizers of the alleged network. One was Shayan, the Intelligence Ministry’s director-general for fuel, who had previously served as a senior ministry interrogator in major oil cases.
Sources say that Shayan used his influence over cases ranging from the missing oil rigs scandal to the Crescent case to accumulate considerable wealth.
The third figure was Meysam Darzinejad Rami, director-general of the Intelligence Ministry Pension Fund, through whom the sources say legal cover was provided for the oil sales. He previously headed security at the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (EIKO), the vast economic conglomerate controlled by the office of Iran’s supreme leader.
According to Iran International’s sources, Shayan and Darzinejad built an extensive oil-sales operation around nine influential trustees, one of whom was Aghayari.
Mohsen Fallahian, son of an ex-intelligence minister
One of the best-known members of the alleged network is Mohsen Fallahian, the son of Ali Fallahian, who served as intelligence minister under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Ali Fallahian has been widely accused of being one of the architects of the Islamic Republic’s campaign of assassinations against opponents abroad, including during the period when Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was killed in Paris.
Mohsen Fallahian runs a company in Iran called Sepehr Sanat Negin, whose stated business activities were changed to include oil and gas operations in October last year.
Iran International’s sources say Fallahian obtained authorization to establish an oil-storage facility at Shahid Rajaei Port in Bandar Abbas through his father’s influence and subsequently joined the Shayan Network’s oil-selling operation.
According to the sources, Mohsen Fallahian lives in the UAE and trades oil under another identity, “Mohsen A.,” using a Turkish passport. In one instance alone, the sources say, he converted 200 million dirhams in Iranian oil revenue into cryptocurrency and transferred it to a European country.
Ali Rezaei, son of Mohsen Rezaei
Ali Rezaei, son of Iran’s newly appointed security chief Mohsen Rezaei, is also identified by the sources as one of the Shayan Network’s trustees.
Rezaei is married to the daughter of Leili Boroujerdi, a granddaughter of Ruhollah Khomeini. For years, he served as deputy for communications at the Secretariat of the Expediency Discernment Council, effectively serving as his father’s deputy.
Iran International’s sources say Rezaei has for some time been living at the Address Mall hotel in Dubai, where he works as an oil trader. They allege that he is among the Shayan Network trustees who have failed to return hundreds of millions of dollars in oil-sale proceeds.
Ali Bayandorian, a trustee for several networks
Another member of the alleged network identified by Iran International’s sources is Ali Bayandorian, 52, who was born in Tehran and lives on Morvarid Street in Tehran’s Saadat Abad neighborhood, although he spends much of the year in the UAE.
The United States sanctioned Bayandorian in January 2020 over his links to Triliance Petrochemical, a Hong Kong-based broker that the US Treasury said facilitated sales of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products on behalf of the National Iranian Oil Company.
Iran International’s sources say Bayandorian sells oil and petrochemical products through a network of companies registered in Iran and Southeast Asia. They also allege that he handles financial transactions related to sanctioned oil sales and pays kickbacks to Shayan through an account in the UAE belonging to one of his wife’s relatives, a woman named Neda.
Before joining the Shayan Network, according to the sources, Bayandorian was a trusted intermediary for a network associated with the Supreme National Security Council.
Because he worked with several parallel networks, the sources say, he sometimes failed to pay Shayan’s share on time or in full. Shayan therefore created a rival for him: Ahmad Maroufkhani, chairman of the board of the Oil Products Exporters’ Union, whom the sources describe as one of the Intelligence Ministry network’s second-tier trustees.
Ehsan Sakhaei, son-in-law of Rouhani’s intelligence minister
Ehsan Sakhaei is another person identified by the sources as a trustee in the Shayan Network. He is 51, a Swiss citizen and the son-in-law of Mahmoud Alavi, who served as intelligence minister under President Hassan Rouhani.
According to Iran International’s sources, Sakhaei lives in Dubai’s Vision Tower.
Six years ago, during a Bank Mellat corruption trial, Sakhaei was accused of acting as a fixer who used his father-in-law’s influence to secure multibillion-toman debt write-offs for major bank debtors.
Iran International’s sources say Sakhaei has failed to return several hundred million dollars in proceeds from Iranian oil sales.
Ehsan Tahayori, son of an IRGC brigadier general
Ehsan Tahayori is a well-known Iranian currency dealer who, according to Iran International’s sources, failed to hand over $700 million in Iranian oil revenue in one case alone.
Tahayori, owner of the Arz Iran currency exchange, is the son of IRGC Brigadier General Shams-Ali Tahayor, also known as General Tahayori.
Iran International’s sources identify Tahayori as the principal suspect in a one-billion-dirham fraud involving Iran’s NIMA foreign-exchange system. They also allege that he was released and helped to flee with the assistance of the Intelligence Ministry.
Two sources told Iran International that authorities in the UAE arrested Tahayori during the war and that he is now in prison.
Photographs published earlier and reported to show his luxury cars at his villa in Lavasan had caused controversy in Iran.
Rouhollah Razavi, son-in-law of a Paydari Front spokesman
Another figure identified by the sources is Rouhollah Razavi, the son-in-law of Majid Mottaghifar, spokesman for the hardline Paydari Front.
Iran International’s sources say it was through this political connection that Razavi became one of Shayan’s trusted intermediaries and describe his office in Tehran’s Kamranieh neighborhood as a hub for backroom oil deals.
The sources allege that Razavi has retained more than $1 billion in oil-sale proceeds and provided information about rival trustees in an effort to push them out of the market.
Mohammad-Hadi Momenin, major bank debtor and oil broker
Another trustee identified by the sources is Mohammad-Hadi Momenin, born in 1989.
Iran International’s sources allege that Momenin controls approximately $2 billion in Iranian oil revenue that has not been returned. His name has appeared on the boards of more than 40 companies in Iran.
Last year, when the names of major bank debtors were released, it emerged that Momenin owed Karafarin Bank 743 billion tomans.
The sources say he fled the UAE for Oman during the war and later traveled from there to China, where they say he is refusing to respond to his creditors.
Ehsan Dastgheyb, son of Iran’s ‘Bribery King’
The ninth individual identified by the sources is Ehsan Dastgheyb, son of Abdollah Dastgheyb, a nephew of a former Shiraz Friday prayer leader who is known as Iran’s “Bribery King.”
Ehsan Dastgheyb lives in Dubai and sells fuel oil for the Shayan Network, according to Iran International’s sources. They allege that he, too, has failed to return a large sum of money to Iran.
Network comes under pressure
Following Shayan’s dismissal, Iran International’s sources say both he and Meysam Darzinejad Rami are expected to be arrested and that the network has come under increasing pressure.
The sources say the Shayan Network is only one of several networks of trustees involved in Iranian oil sales and estimate that intermediaries across these networks have collectively failed to return as much as $110 billion in oil revenue.
They also say Oil Minister Paknejad could soon be dismissed, although he has mobilized his political connections in an effort to remain in office.
On July 24, Tehran prosecutor Ali Salehi said 59 cases had been opened against managers of trustee companies, with 43 reaching the indictment stage. He said 22 defendants had been sent to prison and that Interpol Red Notices were being pursued for 15 fugitives.
The prosecutor did not publicly identify the 15 fugitives, making it impossible from the announcement to determine whether any members of the Shayan Network were among them.
Iran International’s sources expressed doubt that the alleged network would be fully pursued, pointing to the powerful connections of those involved: they include sons and sons-in-law of former intelligence ministers, the son of the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and people connected to the Paydari Front and influential clerical families.
According to the sources, the Shayan Network alone was responsible for about $11 billion in Iranian oil-sale proceeds that were not returned to the state.
