The corruption of Masoumeh Ebtekar and Family (Part Two)
According to Fereshtegan Financial, a now dissolved credit institution, Seyed Taha Hashemi, the youngest son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, has accumulated over 650 million tomans (153.5 million USD) in debt. Once the public gained knowledge of this, the trend ”پسر_ابتکار” (#son_of_initiative) became popular on Twitter and many critical, outspoken Tweets regarding this were posted.
In 2015, a spokesperson of the Judiciary announced an arrest warrant for Ebtekar’s son, Seyed Taha Hashemi. Ebtekar addressed the public with a Tweet claiming that the arrest was based on personal matters, not theft. Nader Ghazipour, a political representative for the City of Urmia, issued the following statement:
“The family of Masoumeh Ebtekar is using government rent money from several families. . . when the police officers went to his house with the arrest warrant of Taha Hashemi, they faced obstruction by the vice president’s bodyguards.”
In 2017, Masoumeh Ebtekar was appointed Vice-President for Women and Family Affairs. According to an article in 2019, Ebtekar retained personal authority over all procurements within the Vice President’s office. Allegedly, she issued all contracts without any form of bidding or legal procedures. These media reports claim that Ebtekar’s son made a 120% profit through buying and selling for the Vice President.
In addition to each of these claims, Taha Hashemi is well known for making friends with young professionals. He would convince them and their families to agree to projects with no written contracts or legal outline. While using Ebtekar’s positional power and government financial accounts for confidence purposes, unofficial business deals are made by Taha Hashemi with guaranteed support of his mother, the Vice President of Women and Family Affairs. Taha Hashemi stages these projects as low-risk investments to then leave those investors without property or return investment money.
Eissa Hashemi, the eldest son of Ebtekar, worked at TOSAN Bank from April 2012 to November 2014 as a Human Resource consultant. TOSAN Bank is a subsidiary of TOSAN Group, which also owns TOSAN Intelligent Data Miners Co. Eissa’s spouse, Maryam Tahmasebi, also worked at TOSAN as did several of their U.S.-related friends.
In August 1979, a charity organization called Zainab Kobri Charity (ZKC) was founded on land seized by the government. Fatemeh Barzegar, Ebtekar’s mother, is the CEO of the ZKC. The Board of Trustees for ZKC includes Masoumeh Ebtekar, Ezra Barzegar (Ebtekar’s aunt), Eissa Hashemi (Ebtekar’s eldest son) and Mehdi Chamran (the Head of the Tehran City Council), among many others.
To contextually understand Ebtekar’s corruption, it is vital to know Ebtekar’s husband, Seyed Mohammad Hashemi, and what role he plays. Hashemi was an Iranian intelligence officer from 1980-1981. He went on to become the head of Foreign Intelligence at the Ministry of Information.
In the late 1980s, Hashemi received a government project worth 5 billion toman (about 2.3 billion USD). The project was to research oil exploration in the Persian Gulf despite lacking expertise or experience in the oil industry. Hashemi rented a five-story building in Tehran for this project but only utilized one unit as an office with a secretary, security guard, accountant, and his youngest son, Seyed Taha Hashemi.
It is further alleged that no actual work was done. Fraudulent work reports were merely translated from documents found on the internet. This huge infusion of cash gave Hashemi the ability to develop his international conglomerate.
To read the first part click here.
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