Here, we will look at some of the most egregious things that the MEK has uncovered over the past few weeks. In our second and final piece, we will look at the regime’s import/export scams that have plagued the country for over 40 years.
The MEK reported that, in mid-April, a 12-year-old girl in Ilam set fire to her torn clothes to hide her family’s poverty and died as a result. This tragedy was included in a report by the Jahan Sanat paper about part of Iran’s budget being lost by the Budget Supreme Court. The report held that $5 billion was taken out of the country to buy goods, but the goods were not brought back in, which has resulted in poverty.
Akbar Torkan, a former adviser to President Hassan Rouhani, said in addition that $20 billion in foreign currency was sold at an artificially low price to regime insiders who were supposed to import goods. These goods were then sold at drastically inflated prices, which the MEK reports is an ongoing fraud to steal from the Iranian people.
The MEK wrote: “The difference between the real currency exchange rate and the rate of the transferred currency (very cheaply) in the same year of 2018 is equal to one hundred and sixty thousand billion tomans, which is more than the general budget of the country in 2018.”
Even Torkan admits that the 40 year-long scandal has “wasted” Iran’s wealth and the MEK noted how the regime had the money to waste on this, but not enough to fight the coronavirus without requesting sanctions relief and a $5 billion loan from the World Monetary Fund.
The MEK has previously discussed the regime’s double standard with regard to paying for the coronavirus, noting that they claimed they were doing well enough at controlling the disease to refuse aid from the US and Doctors Without Borders, but they cry poverty when they could extort others.
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Which Is Threatening the Lives of Iran’s People, Sanctions or the Regime?
The MEK wrote: “[The regime has engaged in] institutionalized corruption for years, while trust between the state and the nation, which is the most important asset of a government has reached zero, looting, plundering, and the destruction of the country’s productive foundations have finally led to the disintegration of the middle class. The middle class always maintains the balance of society. As a result, we have to wait for a huge explosion, and this is a danger that the regime is well aware of.”
Of course, while the regime wants to suppress the building uprising, this will not work because they are refusing to listen to the struggling Iranian people, so further dissent is inevitable.
The MEK wrote: “The Iranian regime is determined to exhaust the protesting youth and insurgents so that it may be able to diffuse the explosion by a large scale massacre by removing the quarantine and social distancing rules.”
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MEK: Report on Iran Regime’s Crimes During Coronavirus: Part 1
