Tehran, Iran \u2013<\/strong> Iranian authorities are creating more unofficial channels to sell oil and import essential goods under the weight of United States sanctions and a looming war, but judges and experts have raised alarms over risks of corruption.<\/p>\n An expanding network of state-linked \u201ctrustees\u201d has been handling shadowy deals to export Iranian petroleum and other sanctioned products with billions of dollars in proceeds yet to return to the country, according to oil executives, lawmakers and judicial officials.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Speaking to judges and provincial officials at a meeting this month, judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei said he has been going after the unnamed trustees through financial authorities and they must return the money.<\/p>\n \u201cWho gave them this oil and other facilities? You at the Central Bank and the economy ministry and other places, was it not you who said you audited these trustees?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n For years, Iranian governments have struggled with returning foreign currency revenues yielded from selling the country\u2019s vast oil resources, something that has worsened an ailing economy marked by rampant inflation and a depreciating national currency.<\/p>\n In an interview in mid-February that has since captured much attention in local media, a senior former oil executive described a major shift in how Iran\u2019s oil money was handled as hopes faded for resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and lifting sanctions.<\/p>\n Ali Akbar Pour Ebrahim, a former CEO of Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO), the arm of the Ministry of Petroleum that sells most of Iran\u2019s crude oil, told the semiofficial Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) the ministry has lost its agency in handling the funds.<\/p>\n He explained that during the administration of former President Hassan Rouhani \u2013 when US President Donald Trump started his \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d sanctions in 2018 after unilaterally reneging on the nuclear accord \u2013 the ministry directly handled oil proceeds, but it was sidelined during the administration of his successor President Ebrahim Raisi.<\/p>\n \u201cThey forced the Petroleum Ministry to shut down its own trustees and created bank trustees who operated under the purview of the country\u2019s commercial banks, which operated under the Central Bank,\u201d Pour Ebrahim said without identifying the people and entities responsible.<\/p>\n The official, who is now a banking and investment executive, said \u201cwe knew from the start\u201d the trustees would take the money for themselves, adding that as much as $11bn was not returned after being handled by them.<\/p>\n According to Pour Ebrahim, the trustees \u201cmushroomed\u201d after taking the money and using nationals from neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan to open bank accounts in the United Arab Emirates and funnel the funds through shell companies.<\/p>\n He said Raisi was following up on the issue before his death in a 2024 helicopter crash and President Masoud Pezeshkian was also informed and ordered a review but no thorough investigation has been conducted.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough the country\u2019s oil money, these people became Rolls-Royce owners in the UAE overnight and are now living in penthouses of expensive hotels there,\u201d Pour Ebrahim said.<\/p>\n Hossein Samsami, a member of the parliament\u2019s economic commission, confirmed to state-affiliated media that some of the agent banks have been colluding with the trustees to declare receipt of oil money to the Central Bank even when no funds were deposited.<\/p>\n Mahmood Khaghani, a career oil official who formerly led the Caspian and Central Asia department of the Petroleum Ministry, was quoted as saying by state media on Saturday that if an independent audit is allowed, it would emerge that the misappropriated money amounts to much more than $11bn.<\/p>\n He said the trustee-based system was originally created about two decades ago when a \u201cshadow government\u201d emerged as international pressure grew over Iran\u2019s nuclear programme, leading to the country eventually being hit with United Nations sanctions.<\/p>\n According to the official, experts were sidelined at the Petroleum Ministry and other bodies in favour of actors affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other unelected state bodies.<\/p>\n \u201cIn effect, a number of people in the parliament, judiciary, government, and security and intelligence apparatuses entered oil deals,\u201d Khaghani said. \u201cThis did not remain limited to selling oil. \u2026 The mafia is not active exclusively in oil but everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n A Tehran-based oil expert, who spoke with Al Jazeera on background, said the nontransparent trustee model only begets corruption as powerful interest groups are given large sums with little to no accountability.<\/p>\n Economist Morteza Afghah told the reformist Shargh newspaper that the misappropriated funds could have played a crucial role in bringing some stability to the country\u2019s currency markets and reducing<\/span> pressure on Iranians losing their purchasing power by the day.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAllocating a strategic and complicated commodity to actors outside of their technical areas \u2013 under sanctions and faced with a currency crunch, without any transparent guarantees for the return of funds \u2013 appears neither logical nor low risk,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But the theocratic establishment is signalling it only plans to increase its reliance on the so-called trustees as authorities put in place contingencies for war.<\/p>\n Agriculture Minister Gholamreza Nouri Ghezeljeh announced this month that importers of essential goods, including food, will now be officially given oil to sell and will be allowed to barter the oil for food.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom next year [starting in late March], it has been decreed that importers of essential goods will be introduced by the agriculture ministry to the Petroleum Ministry so they can get oil shipments,\u201d he said, adding that the new trustees will be able to barter up to $1.5bn.<\/p>\n This comes weeks after the Pezeshkian administration launched an initiative to eliminate a preferential currency exchange rate for imports of essential goods, based on the rationale it was breeding corruption.<\/p>\n With the new scheme by the Ministry of Agriculture Jihad, the same importers who had their profits slashed with the elimination of the cheaper currency rate will now benefit on a new level after becoming oil trustees.<\/p>\n According to state-affiliated media, the Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution could be among the new recipients of Iranian oil, but the head of the top state-run bonyad, or charitable trust, said last week it has received no shipments so far.<\/p>\n In late January, Pezeshkian convened the governors of Iran\u2019s border provinces and announced on state television he is delegating some authority to them.<\/p>\n The empowered governors may import \u201call goods that are directly linked with the livelihoods of the people and the needs of the market\u201d in case of war, including importing without using foreign currency, bartering and allowing sailors to bring in products under simplified customs rules.<\/p>\n Another major development emerged last week also linked to Iran\u2019s efforts to circumvent US and UN sanctions to sell its oil through its shadow fleet of tankers that turn off transponders and conduct ship-to-ship transfers outside official ports.<\/p>\n A former Ports and Maritime Organization official, who now consults for the state-run oil seller NICO, told ILNA the leaders of the establishment have greenlit a process to sell Iran\u2019s sanctioned ships for scrap metal to replace them with new vessels to evade sanctions.<\/p>\n Majid Ali Nazi said NICO has already sold a sanctioned vessel for about $14m \u2013 several times lower than a nonsanctioned tanker would be worth.<\/p>\n \u201cIt costs $8m to rent nonsanctioned vessels from Singapore to China or Malaysia with a daily demurrage cost of $110,000 in addition to the issue of the shipment\u2019s security. So if we purchase a nonsanctioned ship costing $70m that can work for us for a year, it is undoubtedly worth it, and we can take care so it does not enter the sanctions list for a year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Iranian authorities have not publicly commented on the claim about the vessels but maintain oil sales remain strong despite Washington\u2019s stated efforts to drive them to zero.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has been increasingly focusing on intercepting tankers carrying Iranian oil, also pressuring China through sanctions and threats to stop oil purchases from Iran, which has in turn threatened to shut down the strategic Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tehran, Iran \u2013 Iranian authorities are creating more unofficial channels to sell oil and import essential goods under the weight of United States sanctions and a looming war, but judges and experts have raised alarms over risks of corruption. An expanding network of state-linked \u201ctrustees\u201d has been handling shadowy deals to export Iranian petroleum and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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