News reports on Tuesday said Finance Minister Shams-eddin Hossaini had fired Farzad Ahmadi, a member of the Board of Directors of Bank Melli, and accepted the resignation Mahmud-Reza Khavari, the governor of Bank Melli.
Mohammad Azizi, an adviser to the finance minister, was quoted as saying the governor of Bank Saderat had also been dismissed and the governor of Bank Saman would soon be fired.
Azizi said Bank Melli is government-owned and its officials are hired and fired by the finance minister, but the other two banks are now private so their officials can only be deposed by the governor of the Central Bank.
Officials said two weeks ago that seven banks had been defrauded as part of a huge fraud involving 28 trillion rials ($2.6 billion).
Conservative politicians have been trying to tie the fraud to President Ahmadi-nejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, but the latest developments move the case far from him.
Meanwhile, the Judiciary said the number of those implicated in the crime has risen from 19 to 22.
“A number of these people are being held in temporary detention, and some have been released on bail,” said judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossain Mohseni-Ejai.
Ejai, also the national prosecutor-general, was assigned September 15 to lead the investigation of the case. He blamed the Central Bank for failing to take timely action to prevent the fraud.
“The Central Bank has claimed that it had been informed of this issue. Now, my question is: why did they not take any action to prevent this and why they did not inform the Judiciary?”
Ejai was joined in his criticism by Majlis Deputy Mohammad-Ebrahim Nekunam, who didn’t just reserve his harsh words for the Central Bank. Speaking to reporters, he said the Majlis Article 90 Committee had sent a letter last year to the heads of several banks, including Banks Melli, Saderat and Refah – some of Iran’s largest banks – warning them about potentially illegal activities by Amir-Mansur Aria, the main suspect implicated in the embezzlement. However, the fraud still took place, he said.
The Article 90 Committee—of which Nekunam is a member—investigates complaints related to the government.
Nekunam also produced a revised financial figure, saying the crime wasn’t anywhere near the figure bruited about the last two weeks. He said the funds embezzled totaled just 1,730 billion rials ($165 million), a mere 6 percent of the 28 trillion rials ($2.6 billion) everyone else has cited.
No one in the Judiciary has used the lower figure, so it wasn’t known what credence to give it.
The failure to detect and prevent the fraud is being described as a collective responsibility, a massive error to match a massive fraud.
“In the recent case some of the officials announced that they were not aware of the fraud taking place,” said the head of the General Inspection Organization, Hojjat-ol-Eslam Mostafa Pur-Muhammadi.
“It is true that we do not consider them as offenders, but we believe they lacked insight. They should have had supervision and prevented fraud from taking place on such a large scale.”
But Pur-Mohammadi’s was hardly the strongest chastisement so far.
“Embezzlers are like terrorists because embezzlement is a terrorist action aimed at the country’s economy,” said conservative Deputy Bijan Nobaveh.