Leaked Audio Exposes the Corruption of Prominent Figures in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards
After a three-day silence, the Fars News Agency of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard confirmed, on February 13, 2022, the authenticity of the leaked audio recording, which was published by Radio Farda, which uncovered corruption and disputes among the leaders of the first ranks in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are the militias that are considered the black box of terrorism of the Khamenei regime.
In this recording, the direct involvement of the former mayor of Tehran and the current Speaker of Parliament, General Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the former commander of the Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani (who died in an American airstrike in Baghdad in early 2020), Deputy Coordinator of the IRGC, Jamal al-Din Abromand, and the head of the Intelligence Service of the IRGC, Hossein Taeb, was indicated.
The newly leaked audio recording, which dates back to 4 years ago, provoked wide reactions in the media, including deputies in the Iranian parliament and local newspapers, amid the silence of the IRGC officials, and its media refused to provide more details in this regard.
It is noteworthy that from time to time the secrets of the financial practices of the Revolutionary Guards appear, and new threads of the corruption networks that it manages are revealed.
Rampant Corruption
On February 10, 2022, the Persian-speaking American Radio Farda published a leaked 50-minute audio recording, in which it exposed the depth of corruption in the IRGC and the involvement of figures at the highest levels in it.
The radio obtained this recording, which mostly includes a confidential conversation that took place in 2018 between the former commander of the IRGC, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, and the IRGC’s assistant in economic and construction affairs, General Sadeq Zolqadrnia, on corruption cases related to the Quds Force, the IRGC Cooperative, and the Tehran municipality.
In the recording, Zolqadrnia said that, “Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, then mayor of Tehran, was very upset about the issue of corruption related to the municipality and the IRGC's cooperative.”
Zolqadrnia added that: “The Abromand team in the IRGC Cooperative discovered a shortfall in the institution’s funds by about 8,000 billion tomans, then Ghalibaf asked me to sign a memorandum of understanding in the amount of that amount in order to solve the problem.”
Zolqadrnia continued: “I told Ghalibaf: You have allocated 8,000 billion tomans to projects instead of giving it to Rasa company [a subsidiary of YAS Holding], while those projects do not belong to YAS Holding, which is affiliated with the Cooperative Foundation of the IRGC, at all. Ghalibaf said at the time: 'Do not mention these names to me.' Then he collapsed.”
In another part of this audio file, the former commander of the IRGC, Jafari, said that Qassem Soleimani was also upset about confronting the Abromand gang accused of corruption and spoke personally to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“Soleimani told Khamenei that he was upset and despairing, and he also told him that Massoud Mehrdadi had squandered huge sums of money from the treasury, and he should be held accountable,” Jafari said.
The Rasa company that was mentioned in the leaked audio recording, its full name is Raisa Mobin company, and it is affiliated with YAS Holding Company, and it was a party to the main contract of the Tehran municipality in some large projects.
It is noteworthy that the YAS Holding Company, known as the YAS Group for Economic Development Company, in which Soleimani refused to open files of financial corruption, was the main arm of the Cooperative Foundation of the IRGC, which was active in the areas of services, mediation, and housing.
This company played the role of the treasury of the Quds Force, the foreign intervention arm of the IRGC, and was considered one of the sources of funding for the militias formed by the Quds Force under Soleimani's leadership in the Middle East.
Corruption has become so rampant in YAS Holding that the authorities have had to dissolve it and arrest some of its executives in 2017.
Among those arrested are: Issa Sharif, who served as the deputy mayor of Tehran during Ghalibaf's tenure, in March 2021, he wads sentenced by a military court to 20 years in prison; the other defendant, Mahmoud Seif, who was also sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In addition to Massoud Mehrdadi, the economic successor to the Cooperative Foundation of the IRGC, he was sentenced to two years in prison.
The Quds Force
Zolqadrnia revealed, in the audio recording, that Khamenei had ordered 90% of the financial resources to be given to the Quds Force, in return for only 10% to be given to the Revolutionary Guards.
In this regard, Zolqadrnia pointed out that Yas Holding Company made four remittances in a row, estimated at 100 billion tomans, 70 billion tomans, 132 billion tomans and 50 billion tomans, but he added that during the group's financial exchanges with the Quds Force, debts amounting to 1071 billion tomans appeared.
According to Zolqadrnia, this group squandered the money and property of the Quds Force, this led to a dispute between Esmail Qaani, Soleimani's successor, and Jamal al-Din Abromand, the assistant for coordination affairs in the IRGC and the first person in the Yas Holding Company.
According to what Zolqadrnia said in the audio recording, a meeting was held in the presence of Soleimani and Abromand and they agreed to discuss 1071 billion tomans, but Abromand intended to pay this money through the IRGC Cooperative Foundation.
Also in this audio file, Zolqadrnia accused the head of the IRGC’s intelligence, Taeb, of supporting Ghalibaf.
At the end of the lengthy audio recording, the head of the office of Mohammad Ali Jafari (the commander of the IRGC at the time) asked Zolqadrnia not to record the conversation, citing the inability to challenge such high-ranking officials.
The strongest evidence of the credibility of what the head of Jafari's office said is that Ghalibaf, Abromand, and Taeb now occupy the highest and most important security positions and contribute to the country's decision-making.
It is noteworthy that Jafari had held the position of commander of the IRGC for ten years, before the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a decree appointing Hossein Salami in April 2019, this came two weeks after the IRGC was designated a terrorist organization, by decree of former US President Donald Trump.
As for the fate of Zolqadrnia, it is still shrouded in mystery, after the fabrication of a drug possession case during a diplomatic trip from Tehran to Jakarta on July 4, 2021, as a result, the general was removed from the military, economic and political arena in Iran.
On his part, Iranian activist and journalist Reza Alikhani pointed out, in an article, that the leaked audio about the penetration of corruption into the IRGC, the involvement of prominent figures in it indicates that the entire regime is internally corrupt.
“The summary of the contents of the newly revealed audio file shows that there is a rivalry between the internal mafia gangs in the IRGC and its intelligence service,” he added.
“Khamenei's intervention and ordering him to allocate ninety percent of the proceeds of the corruption file to the Quds Force, means that the IRGC and the Quds Force are eating from the official budget of the country, as well as from projects and other corruption files through the institutions and companies subject to them,” he pointed out.
Institutional Conflict
To face the new impasse, the Iranian parliament and the National Security Committee announced their intention to investigate the incident that revealed rampant corruption within the IRGC, which forms the spearhead of the regime in repression and chaos, with a premature indication of its results.
A member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini, said in a statement to the Iranian ILNA news agency on February 12, that: “This committee will start an investigation into the leakage of an audio call between military personnel talking about corruption cases.”
He stressed that the leakage of such calls indicates the intervention of foreign hands to spy on Iranian leaders, claiming that they aim to destabilize Iran.
Mishkini considered that this incident is part of a psychological war against Iran by international and regional powers, stressing that such actions cannot undermine the resolve of the IRGC.
In turn, the researcher on Iranian affairs, Mr. Hisham Elbakly, said in a statement to Al-Estiklal: “The problem of corruption in Iran is no longer a hidden matter that can be denied or covered up. Corruption levels have reached record levels, including the IRGC and most official institutions, this seriously affects the country’s already crippled economy due to US sanctions.”
“There is an institutional conflict going on between the ruling regime and the IRGC in the context of controlling governance in general or controlling state resources and decision-making places, especially in light of the absolute powers enjoyed by the IRGC to defy the Iranian government, including the army,” he added.
“The timing of the leak is very important, as it comes in light of Iran’s attempts to reach a new agreement with Western countries on the Iranian nuclear weapon, this sparked the conflict once again between the government and the IRGC, in addition to the attempts of government arms to remove the cover from the IRGC and the corruption it is doing within the Iranian state,” Mr. Elbakly noted.
“The Iranian people's discontent with the financial corruption and repressive practices of the IRGC may compel the Iranian regime to conduct some show trials on a limited number of employees of this entity, but its aim is no more than to prove that the corrupt practices within the IRGC are individual and to achieve false transparency,” he pointed out.
The American newspaper, World Net Daily, revealed that the budget allocated to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard amounted to $3.3 billion in 2013, and doubled to $6 billion in 2015, then it decreased to $4.5 billion in 2016, but returned to rise to $6.9 billion in 2017.
