Iraqi Parliamentary Speaker In Tehran To Call For Regional Talks
Visiting Tehran, Iraq's parliament speaker has stressed Baghdad’s commitment to helping ease regional tensions through diplomacy.
Visiting Tehran, Iraq's parliament speaker has stressed Baghdad’s commitment to helping ease regional tensions through diplomacy.
Mohammed al-Halbousi, who arrived in Tehran at the head of a parliamentary delegation Wednesday, said the country’s Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi had attended the latest round of talks between Tehran and Riyadh, which was held in the in Baghdad last week. Al-Halbousi made the remarks in a joint press conference after meeting with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.
“We see negotiation and understanding as the solution to problems between neighbors,” al-Halbousi said. “Many problems require dialogue and consultation”. Diplomatic relations between Sunni Muslim-ruled Saudi Arabia and predominantly Shiite Iran were broken off in 2016, with the two supporting opposing sides in conflicts in both Syria and Yemen.
During his one-day visit, al-Halbousi was also scheduled to meet with President Ebrahim Raisi, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani, and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
Halbousi's visit to Iran − his second since 2018 when he assumed office − took place as factional discussions continue over forming a new Iraqi government several months after parliamentary elections. Halbousi’s Sunni alliance is part of a parliamentary bloc in which it is allied with Muqtada Sadr’s Shiite party and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, but the process of forming a government is hindered by the complexities of sectarian arrangements and opposition from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Shia parties close to Tehran.
Zabihollah Khodaeian, the judiciary spokesman, told reporters Tuesday that Ahmad Hashemi-Shahroudi was also liable for "returning the funds" in the case involving Sarmayeh Bank. But some media have claimed Hashemi-Shahroudi fled to Iraq when a business partner, Mohammad Emami, was arrested in 2016. Emami has been sentenced to a 20-year prison term, according to Khodaeian.
Another defendant in the case, Shahabeddin Ghandali, former chief executive officer of the Iran Teachers’ Reserve Fund, was arrested in 2016 on charges of embezzling $2.5 billion. The fund, which has 800,000 members and is run by the education ministry, was an investor in Sarmayeh Bank.
According to a confidential report of the Iranian parliament leaked by reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi in December 2020, Hashemi-Shahroudi and Emami took loans from Sarmayeh between 2012 and 2014 to invest in property. They subsequently sold the properties to Sarmayeh at far higher prices, with the bank − according to the report − waiving penalties for late repayment.
The fund lost nearly $3.5 billion of its investments in Sarmayeh Bank as a result of fraud perpetrated by, according to judicial officials, over 400 individuals.
Parviz Kazemi, minister of labor and social welfare under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cabinet, Ammar Salehi, son of army commander Ataollah Salehi, and Hadi Razavi, son-in-law of Mohammad Shariatmadari, minister of labor in Hassan Rouhani's cabinet, were among defendants in the case.
Corruption and cronyism, often associated with political figures and groups, has plagued Iran for over a decade. There have been several massive fraud and embezzlement cases since then, including in major banks and other financial institutions.
In 2017 and 2018 corruption in the financial sector and rising prices sparked the biggest wave of anti-government protests since the unrest over a disputed election in 2009.
In October 2020, Spain extradited Sarmayeh’s former chief executive officer (CEO), Alireza Heydar-Abadipour, who had been arrested in 2019 following a "red notice" to Interpol issued by Iranian police. Heydar-Abadipour had been sentenced in absentia to a 12-year prison sentence for fraud and embezzlement.
Lacking an extradition agreement with Canada, Iran was unable to pursue Mahmoud-Reza Khavari, the former CEO of the state-owned Melli Bank, who fled to Canada in 2010, after being accused of embezzling billions of dollars.
In 2017 and 2018, protesters who lost their deposits in the Samen al-Hojaj Finance and Credit Institution in Khorasan province held rallies in front of banks and other financial institutions. Samen al-Hojaj, which went into liquidation, had lent tens of millions of dollars at a very low interest rate and paid high salaries to some officials, while not paying dividends to small investors lured with promises of high returns.
Speaking at a pharmaceutical seminar Monday, Dr Ramin Sarami, chairman of the health ministry's new medical technologies, said the number of programs to develop seven variants exceeded the total of all approved vaccines in the world. "These [projects] could have been limited to two vaccine development centers," he said.
Iran approved development of seven different vaccines – including CovIran Barekat (Barakat), Pasto-Covac, Sinagen, Razi Cov Pars, Fakhra, Noora, and SpikoGen -- when there were less than ten other major vaccine development projects underway worldwide and even fewer that received international approval. None of the Iranian varieties received international approval. Even neighboring Iraq does not admit travelers vaccinated by Iranian variants. 18 million doses are stored and are about to expire.
CovIran Barakat, the most widely promoted homegrown vaccine, was developed by Barakat Foundation, a charitable entity and business group controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office, while the program for development of Noora and Fakhra were launched by the Revolutionary Guards and the ministry of defense. These entities had no prior record and experience in the field or the required infrastructures.
The expiration of stored homegrown vaccines is a symbolic representation of uncalculated decision-making and policies in the country, a commentary by political activist Ehsan Bodaghi in reformist Shargh newspaper said Tuesday. "There isn't even domestic demand for the vaccines that were supposed to have long queues of foreign buyers and become our pride," Bodaghi wrote.
Bodaghi said the authorities' uncalculated vaccine policies caused thousands of hours of work, months of delay in mass vaccination, and huge sums of government resources but more importantly, he argued, the loss of "public trust".
In January 2021, when the US-German Pfizer and Moderna and the British-made AstraZeneca were the only shots available, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei banned importing US and British-made vaccines, arguing that the US and Britain could not be trusted. Khamenei told Iranians that he would personally wait until homegrown vaccines became available. He was reported to have received the CovIran Barekat vaccine in June.
Until June 2021, Iran's national vaccination plan had not made any significant progress, with only 1.2 percent of the 84 million population having been fully inoculated. Many countries in the region were well into mass vaccination at the time.
Hardliners, who in general extol self-sufficiency, claimed imported vaccines could be used as a biological weapon against Iranians and a high-ranking Revolutionary Guard official said foreign vaccines were meant to kill one-fifth of the world population.
Most Iranians did not trust the homegrown vaccines and waited until other vaccines, mainly Chinese and some AstraZeneca produced in countries other than Britain, were imported.
Imports did not speed up until August, when hardliner President Ebrahim Raisi took office and somehow China began delivering tens of millions of doses. By then, a severe wave of infections had already killed an additional 40,000 people from June to the end of August.
The controversy over Barekat’s vaccine development went beyond the alleged pre-payment of $1 billion to the company from government coffers. Officials of the foundation including Mohammad Mokhber, now President Ebrahim Raisi's vice-president, had repeatedly promised to deliver tens of millions of doses by the end of August. By September 2021, the company had only produced 14 million doses, according to one of its officials, and delivered only six million to the health ministry.
