ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - In a second case of corruption in a week, a number of MPs in Iran have asked the speaker of parliament to name 170 former candidates who allegedly funded their election campaigns through illegal channels.
The Fars News Agency reported on Wednesday that 30 MPs have asked parliament speaker Ali Larijani to reveal the names of the candidates, who received money from a businessman during former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second term.
The scandal broke when former vice president Mohammad Reza Rahimi, who is serving a five-year prison term for corruption, said in a letter on Tuesday that he had funded the campaigns of parliamentary candidates.
Rahimi alleged that he had dispensed 1.2 billion tomans, donated by a certain businessman. He called the act “normal and legal.”
Rahimi is one of the highest ranking Iranian officials to be prosecuted for the “mishandling of money,” without any details about his case released by Iranian authorities.
Kamaladin Pirmuazin, a reformist MP from Ardabil, is behind the campaign against the candidates, who allegedly received the funds during their election campaigns.
Rahimi wrote in his letter that a special committee was set up during Ahmadinejad’s presidency to “fund conservative nominees across the country with non-state finances.”
Rahimi, who served as the governor of the Kurdish province of Kordestan for four years in the mid 1990s, wrote that a businessman named Jabir Ibdali was introduced to him by high-ranking government officials, including MPs and judiciary officials. He is alleged to have given the money to the lawmakers.
Also last week, Iranian Vice President Ishaq Jahangiri accused Ahmadinejad’s government of smuggling $22 billion of oil money out of the country to Dubai and Turkey, purportedly to keep exchange rates in check.
“These are astonishing numbers,” Iranian media quoted Jahangiri as saying at a conference in Tehran.
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