Mehdi Hashemi is currently pursuing a doctorate at Oxford University in Britain. He is the fourth child of Rafsanjani. It was while Rafsanjani was president in the 1990s that Houshang Bouzari crossed paths with Mehdi.
Bouzari had worked for the Majlis and Oil Ministry. But he became an international business consultant, helping foreign companies strike deals to tap Iran’s oil wealth, and pocketing commissions for what he did.
By 1991, he had signed on to represent five European and Japanese companies. Soon thereafter, he received a message that President Rafsanjani and Mehdi wanted to meet with him. Bouzari was then living in Italy but he flew back to meet them. The president told Bouzari that he wanted Mehdi, then about 22 years old, to learn the oil business.
“It smelled bad from the beginning,” Bouzari said in an interview with Maclean’s, Canada’s major weekly newsmagazine. “To keep him at bay, I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending him all over the world, enjoying his life, going to luxury hotels. I’m sorry to say to you that my company even paid for the ‘escort’ companies that the guy ordered for the hotels in Park Lane, London, Geneva—wherever you can imagine.”
This worked for a while, but soon, Bouzari said, Mehdi, through a friend, demanded $50 million. Bouzari refused. He said he and his partners stood to make far less than that in commissions. And when Bouzari flew to Tehran in May 1993, plainclothes security agents arrested him.
Bouzari told Maclean’s he spent the next eight months in Tehran’s Evin and Towhid prisons. He was beaten about the head until his hearing suffered, and on the soles of his feet until his shoe size grew. His head was forced into a clogged toilet until he was forced to ingest its contents. He confessed to spying for five different foreign intelligence agencies.
In August 1993, Bouzari’s wife, Fereshteh Yousefi, sent $3 million to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, supposedly to pay for Bouzari’s hospital treatment Maclean’s said it saw documents proving that. But Bouzari was not released until February 1994.
When Bouzari got out of prison, he learned Iran had canceled the oil deal he had negotiated, and a new company, managed by Mehdi, had been formed to take over the project—confirming in Bouzari’s mind who was responsible for his torture. It took another $250,000 bribe before Bouzari got his passport back and left Iran for good. He’s been a Canadian citizen since 2002.
Bouzari initially tried to sue the Iranian government, but a Canadian court declined to hear his case because of immunity given to foreign governments under Canadian law. So in 2005, he filed a case against seven individuals he believed played a role in his torture, including Mehdi Hashemi.
None of the defendants responded, and the case lay dormant. Bouzari returned to court last year and asked for a “default judgment” against Mehdi Hashemi, which may be awarded when a defendant fails to defend a case.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Wailan Low reached a decision in August of last year. “It is apparent from the material filed that the plaintiff, Houshang Bouzari, has endured unspeakable torture by the defendant or at his instigation,” Low wrote. The judge ordered Mehdi to pay Bouzari and his family almost $13 million in damages.
Bouzari must still go into court in Britain, where Mehdi lives and goes to college, to try to collect that money. There has been no public word on any progress in the case.
Meanwhile, Mehdi has had his share of trouble at Oxford.
Kaveh Moussavi, an Iranian-born associate research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, first noticed Mehdi at the back of a university seminar in the fall of 2011.
Moussavi became more outraged when he probed into how Mehdi was admitted to Oxford. He complained. Oxford launched an inquiry. The scandal that has erupted since calls into question—at least in the minds of some—the honor of one of the oldest and most respected universities in the world.
Ali Reza Sheikholeslami, an Iranian-born emeritus professor at Oxford’s Wadham College, has described Mehdi’s admission as “smacking of favoritism.” He swore in an affidavit that Edmund Herzig, professor of Persian studies at Oxford and the man primarily assigned to assess Mehdi’s application for admission, told a graduate student to help Mehdi prepare his application and doctoral thesis proposal about the Iranian constitution.
At the internal Oxford inquiry into the matter, Sheikholeslami also alleged that Mehdi’s application references were worthless, as they were all lackeys of his father, and that his academic background—Mehdi has a master’s degree in engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran—was of “no value” to his proposed research on Iran’s constitution. Mehdi, he told the inquiry, is unqualified to study at Oxford.
In an email to Maclean’s, Mehdi said he did not receive any help preparing his application or thesis proposal and called the allegations surrounding his admission to Oxford “baseless.”
A university spokesperson told Maclean’s that the university’s usual requirement that students be pro_cient in English was waived for Mehdi—another concern raised by Moussavi and Sheikholeslami—but said the university found no evidence that Mehdi paid someone to write his research proposal.
“The university is con_dent that the decision [to admit Mehdi] was made solely on academic grounds, whatever others think of that academic judgment. The admitting tutors were not under outside pressure to admit this student; nor did the university receive any _nancial gain, or any other inducement, for doing so. Whether or not people think the decision was sound academically, it was de_nitely not corrupt,” the spokesperson said in a written statement to Maclean’s.
Kaveh Moussavi believes the decision the university must make is an ethical rather than legal one. “I was hoping once the torture ruling has come out of the Canadian court, Oxford would be shamed into throwing this man out,” he says. “But I’m astonished. Nine hundred and something years of history, and it’s being run by men who don’t understand that you don’t allow an unqualified torturer into your midst. And if the scandal is exposed, you get rid of him, and you get rid of the people who allowed him in. Unfortunately, these pygmies running this giant of a university don’t understand that,” he told Maclean’s.
