Billion Dollar Fraud of the President’s Brother

Meysam Tavab, Rooz Online:

The inspector of Tehran municipality recently submitted a report to the city council and the mayor of the capital, in which it expressly states that the elder brother of Mohammad Ahmadinejad who was the contractor for the development of Tehran’s Noor Circle had embezzled about 2 billion Toman (a Dollar is traded for approximately 1000 Tomans in the Iranian black market). Dawood Ahmadinejad is currently the head of the president’s inspectors office whose responsibility is to track and investigate government corruption and fraud.

According to a Rooz reporter, the contract for the development of the Noor Circle project during Ahmadinejad’s mayorship was awarded to the Passdaran Revolutionary Guards Corps, as were many other municipality projects. At the same time, the sub-contractor for all the municipality urban projects that the Passdaran had was the current president’s elder brother. READ MORE

This fraud is made public at a time when there have also been reports about the embezzlement of some 350 billion Toman at the municipality during the days of Ahmadinejad. The amount remains unaccounted for. Nader Shariatmadari, a member of Tehran city council said in this regard that the implementation of the new accounting system in the municipality revealed the discrepancy and that this money had been spent without any documentation and trace. Existing documents do not show who authorized this money to be spent on what. About the timing of the expenditures of the money, he added that while one may say that about 50 billion Toman of this untraceable amount may belong to post-Ahmadinejad days. But what is certain is that 300 billion Toman are untraceable during the days that Ahmadinejad served as the mayor of the capital.

It should be noted that among the presidential candidates of 2005, Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who did not resign from his position as mayor of Tehran and continued to sign decrees while running for president. In those days, his brother was known to be a contractor for large municipality projects.