Ahmadinejad's Deputy Invests in Ten Foreign Countries

The newspaper Qanoon reported, citing the head of the Administrative Violations Committee of the Iranian Presidency, that Hamid Bakai, the executive deputy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his presidency, has "taken assets out of the country" and invested in "ten foreign countries." Hamid Bakai, who was the executive deputy of the president and head of the Secretariat of the Supreme Council of Free Trade Zones in the tenth government, was arrested on Tuesday, June 8. Ali-Asghar Hosseini, one of Bakai's defense lawyers, described the charges against his client as "embezzlement." According to a report on Saturday, July 10, from Qanoon, Mohammad Ashrafi Isfahani, the head of the initial committee investigating administrative violations at the presidency, stated: "The day before yesterday, one of the country's security officials explained in our meeting that Bakai has made financial investments in ten countries." In this report, Ashrafi Isfahani added at the iftar ceremony of the "Tehran-based Azerbaijani Assembly": "He has eaten and taken so much that we will need several years to identify the assets he has plundered and transferred out of the country, let alone return them." The publication of this report in Qanoon comes after the website Tabnak, on Tuesday, June 8, cited Gholamali Jafarzadeh Imanabadi, a representative from Rasht in the parliament, who stated that "one of Bakai's violations" was the "transfer of 20 trillion tomans from inside the country to currency exchanges in Arab countries." This news was deleted from Tabnak's website a few hours after its publication, but the website Khabar Online, close to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, republished it. Iranian judicial officials have not yet reacted to the reports published about Bakai's "violations." The allegations against Bakai regarding the "transfer of money to currency exchanges in Arab countries" come at a time when Eshaq Jahangiri, the first vice president of Hassan Rouhani, stated on December 9, 2014, that "in the previous government, in less than 18 months, about 22 billion dollars of currency was taken out of the country under the pretext of controlling its price domestically and sold in the markets of Istanbul and Dubai." In October of that year, Arsalan Fathipour, the head of the Iranian Parliament's Economic Commission, stated that "three currency exchangers" made a profit of "7 trillion tomans" using "Central Bank rent." Following Bakai's arrest, reports about a "13 trillion toman violation" in the allocation of land in the Qeshm Free Zone have also been published. In 2011, after the arrest of Alireza Moghimi, Ali-Asghar Parhizkar, and Azadeh Ardakani, the heads of the Arvand and Aras Free Zones and the director of the National Museum of Iran, who were mentioned as close associates of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei and Hamid Bakai, rumors about the potential arrest of these two individuals for financial violations also emerged. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in response to these rumors, called his cabinet a "red line" and stated that "if they want to interfere with it, I must fulfill my legal duty." In this context, the head of the judiciary criticized Ahmadinejad's "baseless accusations."