has now involved himself directly in the issuance of lucrative oil contracts.
The State Department did not categorize the new oil contracting system as either a corrupt practice or an effort to fight corruption. But it noted that two of the three men overseeing the contracting are Khamenehi’s son and the son’s father-in-law.
The human rights reports were issued Friday covering 199 countries and citing human rights violations not only in states hostile to the United States, like Iran, but also in states friendly to the United States, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Iranian report is a voluminous one running to 32 pages of dense small type jammed onto pages with small margins.
The Iran report said, “The most egregious human rights problems were the government’s severe limitations on citizens’ right to peacefully change their government through free and fair elections, restrictions on civil liberties, and disregard for the sanctity of life through the government’s use of arbitrary detention, torture, and deprivation of life without due process.”
But perhaps the most interesting part of the report dealt with corruption, which the State Department reports treat as a human rights issue in all countries.
On Iran, the State Department said, “The law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, but the government did not implement the law effectively, and official corruption and impunity remained a serious and ubiquitous problem in all three branches of government. Many officials expected bribes for providing even routine service. Individuals routinely bribed officials to obtain permits for illegal construction.”
The report noted that under Iranian law all government officials are required to submit annual financial statements to the state inspectorate. But it then added, “There was no information available regarding whether these officials obeyed the law.”
It pointed out that last July 31, Ahmad Qalebani, director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and deputy oil minister, stated that Khatam ol-Anbiya, the construction arm of the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) had been awarded approximately 25 trillion rials ($2 billion at the official rate of exchange) in contracts to develop the country’s oil and gas sector since 2009—and that most of these contracts were awarded without bidding.
The report said that in May opposition websites reported that Khamenehi had issued a decree March 10 directing that all oil and gas contracts be awarded by Petro Nahad, a new entity established within his office.
“Further, according to these reports, all administrative and financial decisions of Petro Nahad were to be controlled by a three-person board of directors, whose members included Khamenehi’s son, Mojtaba Khamenehi, and Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a member of the Expediency Council and Mojtaba’s father-in-law.”
The report summarized without editorial comment a banking scandal that has received much attention in Iran and for which a trial in now ongoing. The 12th session of that trial was just held this week.
The State Department then pointed to another alleged corruption scandal that has not received so much attention.
“On October 31, the Majlis Social Security Investigative Committee reported further financial violations. Chairman Soleiman Jafarzadeh said his committee had unearthed financial violations totaling 10 trillion rials ($800 million) at 150 subsidiaries of the Social Security Investment Company, which managed the Social Security Investment Fund and the Civil Servants Pension Fund. At year’s end no action had been taken on this report,” the State Department noted.
The report also noted that First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi remains in his position, “although an investigation into his alleged corruption continued.”