Tehran Prosecutor: 19 Arrested on Charges of Disrupting Currency Market
As turmoil continues in Iran’s currency market, Tehran’s prosecutor announced on Monday, July 27 the arrest of 19 people on charges of “disruption” in the market.
According to the Iran Students News Agency, ISNA, Ali Qasimehr said in a meeting with judicial officials that those arrested are “agents of market inflammation and false currency fluctuations” and stated that “the case files of these defendants are in the investigation completion phase.”
The dollar rate in Iran’s open market was around 16,000 tomans at the beginning of this year, but suddenly surged in June and reached over 25,000 tomans. Although this rate declined somewhat last week to the 21,000 toman level, it has resumed its upward movement, with the dollar reaching 23,000 tomans on Monday.
Tehran’s prosecutor also mentioned in his Monday statement the arrest of the CEO and three employees of the All-Union Cooperative Company of Government Employees, whose charges include “disruption of the economic system through failure to distribute 400 tons of imported meat obtained with official exchange rates and selling the received currency in the open market, as well as hoarding 500 imported heavy vehicle tires obtained with official exchange rates.”
At the end of June last year, Shargh newspaper reported, citing a letter from the office of Hassan Rouhani, that one billion dollars in official exchange currency that had been paid for importing medicine and essential goods had “gone missing.”
Before that, multiple reports had been published stating that a number of companies importing essential goods either diverted official exchange currency to other uses or sold it at open market rates.
Iranian officials have repeatedly warned about these currency debtors, including one group that exported goods from Iran but failed to return the resulting currency. Hassan Rouhani said about two weeks ago, referring to this second group of currency debtors, that “twenty billion euros worth of goods were exported in late 2019, but the currency has not been returned.”
Tehran’s prosecutor further announced the “opening of judicial cases for 5 pharmaceutical companies” that “obtained large amounts of currency from the Central Bank for importing raw materials and medicines and used part of these resources for other purposes.”
According to him, “these companies received a total of 954 million, 69 thousand, and 151 dollars in currency from the Central Bank.”
The ISNA report, however, does not mention the names of the companies and only states that officials of some of these companies are “in addition to violating exchange currency regulations in the pharmaceutical sector, also accused of paying bribes to certain individuals in the Food and Drug Organization, with 5 managers of the organization arrested.”
Source: Radio Farda
