Annual Smuggling of $20 Billion Worth of Goods into Iran

Alireza Jamshidi, head of the Organization for the Protection of Consumer Rights, assessed the value of smuggled goods in Iran's economy at "$20 billion" during a television program on Wednesday night. The Deputy Minister of Justice of Iran stated that this figure indicates the "ineffectiveness of anti-smuggling laws." Jamshidi had previously announced the value of smuggled goods in Iran's economy for the year 1392 (2013) as $22 billion, claiming it has eliminated over two million job opportunities. According to the head of the Organization for the Protection of Consumer Rights, for every $1 billion of foreign smuggled goods entering the country, 100,000 job opportunities are lost. Jamshidi noted that "some of the laws in this area date back 60 years." The Deputy Minister of Justice emphasized that only 2 to 3 percent of the smuggling volume is discovered annually in Iran. Saeed Mortazavi, former head of the Anti-Smuggling Headquarters in 1389 (2010), had reported the value of smuggled goods in the Iranian market at $19 billion. Subsequently, in 1390 (2011), the Anti-Smuggling Headquarters presented a report to the Economic Commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly estimating the value of smuggled goods in Iran's economy to be between $19 to $24 billion. According to the latest assessment by Habibollah Haghighi, the current head of the Anti-Smuggling Headquarters, the volume of smuggling into Iran has increased to $20 to $25 billion annually, which, according to this official, is twice the total development budget of Iran. If we take this recent assessment as a benchmark, this annual smuggling volume is approximately half of the value of Iran's official imports in the year 1393 (2014). Based on customs reports on Iran's foreign trade performance in the first seven months of this year, legal and official imports during this period were slightly over $24 billion. Alireza Jamshidi, in another part of his remarks on the "Special News Dialogue" program on the second channel of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, referred to the detailed figures of the value of smuggled goods into Iran, stating that the value of smuggled fuel and medicine totals $7 billion annually. According to this official in the Iranian Ministry of Justice, the value of smuggled cosmetics and hygiene products in the Iranian market also reaches about $1 billion annually. He previously mentioned that the Organization for the Protection of Consumer Rights estimated the volume of smuggled goods in 1392 (2013) to include: "$1.1 billion in cosmetics and hygiene products, $2 billion in household goods, $900 million in cigarettes, $3 billion in textiles, and $1.7 billion in mobile phones smuggled through unofficial, illegal channels outside the framework of exports and imports into Iran." Alireza Jamshidi also identified the lack of facilities at Iran's entry points as another problem in combating smuggling. Mehdi Karroubi, the head of the sixth Islamic Consultative Assembly in 1381 (2002), first reported the existence of 33 unauthorized docks controlled by military and security organizations, which became known in Iranian economic and political discourse as "invisible docks." Since then, military, police, and security organizations in Iran have been consistently identified as one of the perennial suspects in the smuggling of goods into Iran. Subsequently, in Tir 1390 (July 2011), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the then-president of Iran, complained at a conference on combating smuggling about the existence of illegal border crossings controlled by specific organizations, referring to these smugglers as "our own smuggler brothers." However, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, described the discussion of smuggling by the IRGC as a "diversionary" issue.