Old wounds open in Iran after bank scandal

While Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is under a heavy media barrage from rivals over a scandal regarding unconventionally big salaries given to top officials of Bank Refah, there is an opinion that the occasion should be grasped to dig into the past and find similar misuses by previous governments.

It was a couple of weeks ago when pay slips went viral showing the bank’s top officials had received salaries easily tens of times greater than average Iranians receive. The published documents also included ones indicating that the officials had received huge facilities as well.

The salary scandal turned into Rouhani’s Achilles’ heel, which was used by the rivals against him.

In reaction to Rouhani’s rivals, the left party is picking on the conservatives over their past misconduct and misuse of public properties.

On June 27, Chairman of the Parliament’s Article 90 Commission Davoud Mohammadi said the commission is going to form a workgroup to address the bank scandal.

Speaking to the government-affiliated IRNA news agency, Mohammadi did not stop there and said the workgroup is also going to address unconventionally frequent gifts of gold coins and banking facilities the Ahmadinejad administration used to give out to favorite ones.

This was met with swift reaction from figures close to former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A few hours after Mohammadi’s remarks, former MP Mehdi Hashemi told the rather conservative Mehr news agency “gifts are different from salaries,” warning against making use of the gifts’ case as a political tool.

On June 25 some news outlets said the government had expelled Bank Refah President Ali Sedqi. However, the following day Sedqi was reported as having denied the expulsion, saying he was still working at his office.

The Judiciary also announced on the same day that it had issued a decree to arrest one of the banks’ officials that had refused to disclose the payment details.

Whether or not the expulsion and arrest warrants are true, what is clear is that the new MPs who just about one month ago started operation, are now going to dig into the scandals that their predecessors in the previous round of the Parliament overlooked over affinity with the government.

Mehdi Sepahvand is Trend Agency’s Tehran-based correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @mehdisepahvand

/By Trend/