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Iraqi Kurdistan president condemns Iran attacks on premier’s office

Aug 17, 2026, 12:09 GMT+1

Iraqi Kurdistan President Nechirvan Barzani on Monday condemned attacks against the office of Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Masrour Barzani and the residence of the region’s security agency chief.

“These attacks are completely unacceptable and constitute a dangerous escalation,” he said in a post on X.

The region’s security agency said earlier in the day that two drones launched from Iranian territory attacked the office of the prime minister.

Barzani urged Iraq’s federal government to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to protect the country’s security and prevent further attacks.

He said protecting the sovereignty, security and stability of Iraq, including the Kurdistan Region, was a shared responsibility and called for efforts to ease tensions.

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Mohsen Rezaei’s son among nine identified in $11-billion Iran oil network
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EXCLUSIVE

Mohsen Rezaei’s son among nine identified in $11-billion Iran oil network

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Iran weighs gasoline rationing as fuel deficit widens

3

Iran lawmaker played direct role in deadly protest crackdown, witnesses say

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OPINION

The three snakes of Zahhak

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EXCLUSIVE

Iraqi Kurdistan president’s office confirms Barzani’s US-Iran backchannel role

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  • The three snakes of Zahhak
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    The three snakes of Zahhak

  • Iran lawmaker played direct role in deadly protest crackdown, witnesses say

    Iran lawmaker played direct role in deadly protest crackdown, witnesses say

  • Mohsen Rezaei’s son among nine identified in $11-billion Iran oil network
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Iran’s new infiltration bill could make ordinary contact a crime

Aug 16, 2026, 23:55 GMT+1
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Two women sit at a cafe in Tehran, one looking at her mobile phone

Iranian lawmakers have advanced sweeping legislation that could send people to prison for speaking to journalists, academic cooperation and unauthorized contact with foreign embassies, dramatically expanding the conduct security agencies could treat as foreign infiltration.

The bill would also give the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards’ Intelligence Organization a central role in establishing prohibited foreign links, potentially handing prosecutors a broad new set of offenses in a judicial system repeatedly criticized by rights groups over due process.

Parliament approved the general framework of the bill on Sunday, though its current text has not been made public.

The latest publicly available draft contains 19 articles imposing prison terms, professional bans and other penalties across journalism, academia, civil society, culture and communications with foreign individuals and organizations.

Approval of the general framework does not mean lawmakers have approved each provision, and the final legislation could differ substantially.

But if its central provisions survive, the legislation would create an extensive new framework for prosecuting alleged foreign influence as authorities intensify prosecutions over perceived links to foreign governments and media.

What could land someone in prison?

Among the most far-reaching provisions is Article 7, which would prohibit sending messages, photographs, videos, audio or other data to non-Iranian media or people engaged in media activity abroad.

The offense would carry a prison sentence, with potentially harsher punishment if the communication occurred under a work arrangement, was deemed intended to undermine national security or took place during “crisis,” “unrest” or “rioting.”

Article 6 would prohibit interviews or other communication with media deemed hostile, including American or Israeli-funded outlets. Speaking to other foreign media would require notification through an Intelligence Ministry system, with failure to notify also punishable by imprisonment.

Under Article 5, the Intelligence Ministry would annually publish a list of foreign governments, universities and institutions approved for scholarships, academic agreements, conferences and scientific cooperation.

Collaboration with institutions outside that list could bring imprisonment, as could sending medical, research or archaeological samples to them.

Private individuals and organizations communicating with foreign embassies or institutions would meanwhile need to notify authorities and obtain written authorization, with limited exceptions for personal and civil-status matters.

NGOs, associations and political parties would be barred from accepting financial benefits from foreign governments, institutions or embassies without approval from a committee including the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC Intelligence.

Violations could bring imprisonment, lengthy bans on social and cultural activity and dissolution of the organization.

Film, documentary, theater, music and book projects involving “prohibited foreign direction or support” could result in permanent professional bans if authorities determine that they question religious rules, portray Iran negatively or promote what the bill calls anti-Islamic culture.

Organizing certain foreign-linked courses or workshops, including online programs, could also bring prison terms, as could knowingly participating in them.

Broad crimes, powerful investigators

The breadth of the prohibited conduct is compounded by the powers given to Iran’s security agencies.

The draft names the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC Intelligence as the principal investigative authorities responsible for presenting evidence of prohibited foreign direction or involvement to judicial authorities.

The criteria they would be tasked with establishing are broad.

Article 1 covers people acting under the supervision, direction, training or guidance of a wide range of foreign governments, international organizations and other non-Iranian entities.

Potential harms include damaging national security or territorial integrity, but also undermining public trust in the political system or reducing electoral participation. Severe prison sentences are envisaged in some circumstances.

Another provision indicates that ignorance of a prohibited foreign connection would not necessarily eliminate criminal liability if authorities conclude negligence or carelessness resulted in harm.

Cases would be heard by Revolutionary Courts, which could also order confiscation of assets and professional bans.

New charges in a system under scrutiny

By criminalizing a much wider range of foreign contacts and communications, the bill could give investigators and prosecutors additional charges in cases involving alleged foreign links.

That prospect is particularly consequential given the record of Iran’s Revolutionary Courts and security agencies.

Human Rights Watch has documented restrictions on access to independent lawyers in national security cases and said Revolutionary Courts regularly fall short of fair-trial standards.

The group reported in February that state-affiliated media had broadcast hundreds of purported confessions, including statements describing collaboration with foreign intelligence agencies and sharing protest footage with Persian-language media abroad.

Amnesty International has similarly documented what it describes as systemic denial of access to lawyers and forced confessions during the January crackdown, including detainees being made to confess to sending protest images to media outside Iran.

The overlap with conduct contemplated by the proposed legislation is striking.

The bill would therefore arrive in a system already accustomed to prosecuting alleged foreign connections, but with a substantially expanded range of conduct explicitly available for prosecution.

It would also criminalize certain foreign-directed economic activity and allow enhanced punishment for other crimes committed under alleged foreign supervision or guidance.

If passed into law in its available or a similar form, the legislation would move the concept of foreign “infiltration” far beyond conventional espionage.

The three snakes of Zahhak

Aug 16, 2026, 18:50 GMT+1
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Roger Macmillan
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«ضحاک دختران جمشید را به حضور می‌خواند»، نسخه‌ای مصور که در دهه ۱۵۲۰ میلادی در تبریز، ایران، با جوهر، طلا و آبرنگ مات روی کاغذ خلق شده است. عکس از مجموعه خلیلی / CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

In the Persian classic Shahnameh, Ferdowsi tells the story of Zahhak, the usurper king who is kissed on each shoulder by Ahriman, the spirit of evil, and finds two black snakes growing from the wounds.

Cut them off and they grow back. The only way to keep them quiet is to feed them, every day, with the brains of two young men. Zahhak reigns for a thousand years on a diet of sacrificed youth, propped up not by loyalty but by appetite.

The story has always worked as a parable for Iranian tyranny. What I think it misses, applied to the Islamic Republic today, is the arithmetic. Ali Khamenei did not build two snakes. He built three.

The Artesh, Iran’s conventional army, was the first snake, inherited from the Shah and never fully trusted. The IRGC was the second, created in 1979 specifically because the revolution did not trust the first. The Basij was folded into the IRGC as its third head.

It is worth remembering that all three answer, on paper as much as in practice, to a single neck. The Iranian constitution names the Supreme Leader as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in their entirety, Artesh, IRGC and Basij alike. There is no independent chain of command outside the Supreme Leader’s authority for a general to retreat into. Politicians and Western commentators in both London and Washington keep waiting for one of these heads to turn on the body. They’re waiting for the wrong signal, because they’re analysing 1979, not 2026.

When the Shah’s generals stood aside in February 1979, they did so because the Artesh of that era was a conscript institution led by officers who owed their careers to a monarch, not a movement, and who had no ideological stake in what came next. That Artesh is not today’s Artesh.

Ali Khamenei spent decades solving exactly that problem. Senior appointments in today’s Artesh are subject to security and ideological vetting tied to the Supreme Leader’s military apparatus. The Middle East Forum has documented how senior promotions require approval from the Supreme Leader’s office following scrutiny of an officer’s security and ideological background. The men at the top of the Artesh are appointees of the system, not survivors of it.

This is why this month’s move to complete the integration of the Armed Forces General Staff with the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters matters more than it has been given credit for. Mojtaba Khamenei, who inherited a system his father spent more than four decades constructing, has now moved to formalise a process of centralisation that had earlier been discussed but was not visibly underway in operational terms.

The lesson learned from 2025 and the Twelve-Day War, according to Iran’s own state reporting, was that redundant command structures slow decision-making. The latest restructuring is intended to reduce that redundancy and further narrow the distinction between the operational command of the Artesh and the IRGC. The underlying logic is clear: the system has little interest in preserving institutional space in which one military arm might begin to think or act independently of the others.

I would also gently push back on those looking for salvation in Iran’s reformists. Pezeshkian’s presidency provides a civilian face and international cover for the negotiating track, and that function matters. But it is not independence.

Ghalibaf is a former senior IRGC commander who has spent decades inside the Islamic Republic’s political and security establishment. Araghchi is a capable diplomat entrusted with representing Tehran in negotiations. Both men operate inside the system’s tolerances, not outside them. Reading their willingness to negotiate as evidence of a moderate faction pulling against a hardline one mistakes tactics for structure.

When Iran has had to cede ground, at Bürgenstock or Islamabad, it has ceded it in the way a company reprices a product: reluctantly, and only as far as survival requires. Ghalibaf gets attacked by the influential ultra-hardline Paydari Front for talking to Americans, and he absorbs it, because someone in the system has to run the diplomatic track.

None of this means the system is stable in the way it looks stable. Ali Khamenei is dead. His son, who has still not been seen or heard in public, inherited the office by appointment and is still consolidating the very apparatus his father designed. The strain is real. But strain inside a structure is not the same as a fracture between its parts. The three heads bicker over how much brain they are fed and by whom, not over whether to keep feeding.

So when I hear commentary asking whether this is the moment the Artesh finally breaks from the regime, or whether Ghalibaf represents the pragmatic wing that might yet reform the system from within, I think of Zahhak.

Nobody in that story is saved by one of the snakes deciding it has had enough. The snakes do not turn on the king. The rupture comes from outside the machinery of the court: Kaveh the blacksmith rises first, turning private grievance into public revolt, rallying the people and creating the conditions for Fereydun’s return. Fereydun then defeats Zahhak and binds him at Damavand. Until that structure itself breaks, all three snakes answer to the same shoulders.

Iran weighs gasoline rationing as fuel deficit widens

Aug 16, 2026, 12:08 GMT+1
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Men are seen at a gasoline station in Qom, Iran.

Iran’s government is considering three proposals to curb gasoline consumption as war damage, import difficulties and a widening gap between domestic production and demand put growing pressure on fuel supplies.

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.

  • Fear of unrest complicates Iran’s gasoline dilemma

    Fear of unrest complicates Iran’s gasoline dilemma

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.

Iran lawmaker played direct role in deadly protest crackdown, witnesses say

Aug 16, 2026, 09:22 GMT+1
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Farzad Fattahi
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Jafar Pourkabgani, a lawmaker representing the southern Iranian province of Bushehr and a former longtime member of the IRGC and Basij, personally fired at protesters during nationwide demonstrations in January, witnesses told Iran International.

Armed forces opened fire on protesters on January 8 and 9 from the rooftops of the Quran Mosque, a nearby Basij facility and surrounding buildings on Ashouri Street in the city of Bushehr, witnesses said.

Several people who said they were present identified Pourkabgani as one of the armed men in the area. Some said he carried a handgun, while others described him as holding a Kalashnikov-style rifle.

One witness said Pourkabgani shouted “Labbaik ya Khamenei,” an expression of allegiance to then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as he fired.

Other accounts described the lawmaker as a leading figure among the armed personnel deployed in the area.

Gunfire against at least 19 people attributed to Pourkabgani

Accounts collected by Iran International attributed the shooting of at least 19 people to Pourkabgani. Witnesses said at least two of those struck by his gunfire have died.

It was not immediately possible to independently establish the identities of all those shot, the weapons used or the precise circumstances of the deaths.

Some residents of Bushehr refer to Pourkabgani by the nickname “Jafar the Axe,” according to local accounts.

Pourkabgani has longstanding ties to the Quran Mosque, one of the locations from which witnesses said gunfire was directed at protesters. Public accounts identified him as head of the mosque’s board of trustees for at least part of the period between 2014 and 2022.

Pressure on bereaved families

One local source with knowledge of the matter said that Pourkabgani visited the homes of some bereaved families after protesters were killed and sought to persuade them to say their children had been killed by “terrorists,” which the families rejected.

Pourkabgani has not publicly addressed the allegations that he personally fired at protesters or pressured bereaved families.

Decades in security and local government roles

Pourkabgani joined the IRGC in the early 1980s and subsequently held security, executive and political positions in Bushehr.

In 2004-05, while holding the rank of IRGC colonel, he headed the local Basij unit responsible for enforcing the Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “enjoining good and forbidding wrong.” Accounts of the unit’s activities included searches of homes, confiscation of equipment and arrests.

He served as governor of Bushehr from about 2005 to 2013 and headed the county’s election headquarters during the disputed 2009 presidential election.

Pourkabgani later served on the Bushehr City Council, including as its chairman, before entering parliament as the representative for Bushehr, Ganaveh and Deylam.

Residents have also said that he was involved in the authorities’ response to the November 2019 protests and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

During the 2022 protests, Pourkabgani was injured in a knife attack in Bushehr’s Kouti neighborhood while serving on the City Council.

Calls for harsh punishment

After the January 2026 protests, Pourkabgani publicly described demonstrators as “rioters” and the demonstrations as a “terrorist operation.”

He called on the judiciary to identify protesters and create official files on them, further demanding that they face the “harshest punishment.”

Viewers who contacted Iran International pointed to what they described as a stark contradiction between Pourkabgani’s position as a representative of the public and the allegations that he fired at the people he was elected to represent.

More than 36,500 Iranians were killed by security forces during the January 8-9 crackdown on nationwide protests, making it the deadliest two-day protest massacre in history, according to documents reviewed by Iran International's Editorial Board.

Iran International's Editorial Board confirmed the death toll on January 25 after reviewing classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families.

Mohsen Rezaei’s son among nine identified in $11-billion Iran oil network

Aug 15, 2026, 21:27 GMT+1
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Mojtaba Pourmohsen
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Relatives of some of Iran’s most powerful security figures, including Mohsen Rezaei’s son, were among nine people tied to an oil-sales network that sources say failed to return about $11 billion in proceeds, an Iran International investigation found.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Iran's oil minister Mohsen Paknejad

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.

  • Scandal rocks Iran's secret oil money network as billions go 'missing'

    Scandal rocks Iran's secret oil money network as billions go 'missing'