Iran's Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade Receives Second Yellow Card from Parliament

On Tuesday, January 9, Iranian parliament representatives were not satisfied with the explanations provided by Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, the Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade, regarding "the import of luxury cars and the prices of certain essential items," and for the second time issued him a "yellow card." According to the House of Representatives news agency, affiliated with the Islamic Consultative Assembly, the representatives voted with 102 in favor, 87 against, and 15 abstentions from a total of 218 present members. However, ISNA reported that the number of attendees at the open session was 219. During the session, Mr. Nematzadeh and Nasser Mousavi Largani, the representative from Falavarjan, accused each other of "lying." Zahra Tabibzadeh Noori, a representative from Tehran, questioned Mr. Nematzadeh, stating that from September 2013 to September 7, 2014, 1,428 luxury cars over 2,500 cc worth more than $66 million were imported into Iran. Mr. Nematzadeh dismissed the statistics provided by Ms. Tabibzadeh Noori as "incorrect" and stated that luxury car imports had decreased from 41,000 units in 2009 to 133 units in the first eight months of this year, with more than half of this amount being ordered by foreign embassies in Iran. In response to a question from Seyed Nasser Mousavi Largani, Mr. Nematzadeh said, "At the beginning of the eleventh government, due to the large stock of sugar and rice, I instructed the state trading company in writing not to carry out imports, and they did not... such a thing." According to Mr. Nematzadeh, foreign rice imports decreased from 1,956,000 tons in the first eight months of 2013 to 829,000 tons in the same period this year, indicating a 40% reduction in the weight of imports of this product. He also stated that sugar imports decreased from 1,579,000 tons last year to 742 tons in the first eight months of this year. The Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade emphasized, "The excessive import of sugar in previous years crippled sugar factories; in 2012, the import tariff was reduced from 110% to zero, which led to the uncontrolled import of sugar into the country." Following these explanations, Nasser Mousavi Largani asked, "Why do you lie and claim that imports have decreased? You are importing wheat at double the price, so how can our farmers dare to cultivate wheat?" Mr. Nematzadeh responded to these remarks by saying, "They say we lie, but the one who lies is the one who has no documented statistics; our statistics are documented, and we speak based on the statistics." On July 24 of this year, parliament also issued a yellow card to Mr. Nematzadeh. Previously, the ministers of Interior, Education, Culture and Islamic Guidance, Science, and Economy had received yellow cards from the Iranian parliament. In recent months, the license granted to Philip Morris for establishing a cigarette factory in the country with an annual capacity of 12 billion cigarettes has been a topic of various discussions between the Iranian parliament's Article 90 Commission and the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade. Mojtaba Khosro Taj, the Deputy Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade of Iran, stated on December 7 that the root of the opposition to granting a license for the activities of Philip Morris Tobacco Company in Iran and the legal import of Marlboro cigarettes was the jeopardizing of the "500 billion tomans" interests of cigarette smugglers in the country.