{"id":347147,"date":"2026-08-07T20:59:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T19:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/?p=347147"},"modified":"2026-08-07T20:59:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T19:59:34","slug":"how-irans-clerical-regime-turned-its-own-people-into-a-revenue-stream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/news\/economy\/how-irans-clerical-regime-turned-its-own-people-into-a-revenue-stream\/","title":{"rendered":"How\u00a0Iran’s\u00a0Clerical Regime Turned Its Own People into A Revenue Stream\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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FILE PHOTO: A meeting at the so-called “Resistance Economy Headquarters” in the Hamedan Governor’s Office<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Five-minute read<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a single trade at the center of the Iranian regime\u2019s economy<\/a>, and it has never changed. Find a gap \u2014 between two exchange rates, between a promised price and a market price, between what the state tells the public and what the state intends to do \u2014 then stand on the profitable side of that gap with a license no ordinary Iranian can obtain. Everything else is costume. The clerical regime has worn the costume of revolutionary justice, of privatization, of resistance to sanctions, of popular capitalism. Underneath, it has run the same racket for forty-seven years, and it has run it against the people in whose name it claims to govern.<\/p>\n

1979\u20131989: theft as theology<\/h2>\n

The first scheme needed no financial engineering, only a decree. In the months after February 1979, the assets of the deposed elite, of political dissidents like the members of the People\u2019s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI\/MEK), of religious minorities, of merchants who fled and merchants who stayed were swept into new “foundations” \u2014 the bonyads<\/em> \u2014 answerable to the clerical leadership and to no auditor, no parliament, no tax authority. The Mostazafan<\/em> (Foundation<\/a> for the Oppressed) took factories, hotels, farmland and apartment blocks. The seizure was sold as \u201cthe poor inheriting the earth.\u201d In practice a public asset base built over a century was moved off the national balance sheet and onto a private one, permanently, and the poor were handed the receipt rather than the property.<\/p>\n

The template was formalized at the end of the decade. Shortly before his death in 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime\u2019s founder, signed the order that created Setad<\/em> \u2014 Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam \u2014 nominally a two-year clean-up operation to manage ownerless property for war widows and veterans. It never closed. In a six-month investigation published in 2013, Reuters valued Setad’s<\/a> real estate and corporate holdings at roughly $95 billion, more than Iran’s annual oil exports at the time, and documented how the empire was assembled through the systematic seizure of thousands of properties from Iranians \u2014 Baha’is, Shia citizens, business owners, emigrants \u2014 with courts obligingly declaring occupied homes “abandoned.” Original owners were then invited to buy back what had always been theirs. That is the regime’s business model in miniature: manufacture the loss, then sell the remedy.<\/p>\n

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Delving into Iran\u2019s #Corruption<\/a> Chronicles \u2013 Part 1https:\/\/t.co\/3uRDWFAqxD<\/a><\/p>\n

— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 21, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n