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Iran Regime’s Presidential Election Farce Riddled With Fraud, Systematic Corruption

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NCRI – Former Iranian MP Ahmad Tavakoli and Abbas Abdi, a known member of the so-called “reformist” camp in Iran, issued a statement admitting how institutionalized financial and economic corruption in Iran have resulted in senior officials becoming “concession greedy” and how “this corruption will eventually find more depth, and today we are faced with systematic and networked corruption.”

In this phase the very oversight bodies involved in the fight against corruption will become influenced and corrupt individuals and begin supporting each other in a networked manner, they added. This in itself will become part of the reason of this situation continuing, according to the Alef website.

Lack of attention to non-transparent spending will lead to financial misuses in candidates resorting to election propaganda.

As political and economic corruption is institutionalized in this regime, the lack of transparency in election expenses has become a systematic subject. This is due to the election infrastructure that has failed to provide a method to prevent non-transparent spending in the election campaign, leading to candidates taking advantage of this loophole.

Tavakoli and Ahmad Amir Abadi Farahani, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s Board of Directors, said very openly in a state TV interview how campaign spending are non-transparent in parliamentary, city council and presidential elections in Iran.

“Unfortunately, there is no transparency and if there was transparency there would be no trade for influence,” he said.

The term “trade for influence” is a reference to the money provided by unknown individuals to those involved in the city council and/or presidential elections, to impose their influence in the next phase.

“Some MPs have spent from 1 to 3 billion tomans (equal to $285 to $735 million),” Tavakoli added.

The four-year salary of an Iranian MP is 250 million tomans a month (around $70,000), adding “Now, where does such an individual come up with $2.5 billion, I don’t know and it’s a whole different story,” said Ahmad Amir Abadi, a member of the Iranian Parliament Board of Directors.

“A person in the Parliament suggested we should add another 5% to the customs on foreign vehicles, and this 5% should be used to purchase more ambulances. At that very time I was aware that one person released 2,000 foreign vehicles from the customs and through this 5% he profited around 3 billion tomans (over $850,000),” he added.

These two MPs went on to refer to the baseless pledges provided by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, adding how senior Iranian regime officials provide pledges in their campaigns that they never live up to.