NCRI – More than 1000 victims of major financial scams by state-affiliated companies in Iran held a protest on Thursday in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city, demanding their rights, according to eye-witness accounts.
The protesters, including victims of the Padideh Shandiz investment scam, demanded that their plundered money be returned, saying that the officials in the companies involved enjoy the support of the mullahs’ judicial and intelligence apparatus.
The rally began at 11.30 in Taqi-Abad Street despite a heavy presence of suppressive security forces. Some protesters gathered in Ahmad-Abad and Malek-Abad districts.
There were chants of “Allah Akbar,” or God is great.
The suppressive forces arrested a number of protesters and transferred them to unknown locations.
In addition to victims of Padideh Shandiz, there were protesters whose investments had been plundered by state-affiliated companies such as Mizan, Pardisan, Tabarok, Samen al-Hejaj, Arman and Badr Tous.
The Padideh Shandiz institute is one of the dozens of financial firms founded in different cities by senior Iranian regime officials in order to plunder the Iranian people’s very little savings and assets.
Padideh Shandiz, which has close links to the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has billed itself as an international tourism development company active in restaurants, tourism and construction and lured investors by promising huge returns on their shares in projects in Shandiz, a suburb of the city of Mashhad, and in the island resort of Kish. Its advertising campaign on state television was taken as reassurance that the regime backed the company.
In January 2015, a huge “fraud” worth $34.3 billion came to light in the company which is believed to have manipulated its shares. Many people who had invested in the company went bankrupt soon after.
Padideh Shandiz is reported to have had a third share in Iranian airports advertisements, as well as paying 5.1% of the state-broadcaster IRIB’s income from advertisements.
In January thousands of people in Mashhad, Tehran, Isfahan, Karaj, Kerman, Rasht, Shiraz and Yazd staged rallies expressing their abhorrence and protest at such plundering and demanding their stolen money and property be returned.
In earlier weeks, victims of the scam rallied outside the Iranian regime’s judiciary in Tehran and chanted slogans against the government of mullah Hassan Rouhani, the fundamentalist judiciary and the regime’s Ministry of Economy.
On January 4, the Iranian Resistance called on the Iranian people, especially the youth, to express their solidarity and support for the protestors and their deprived families. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) emphasized that the sole solution to the growing trend of crime and pillaging by the religious fascism ruling Iran is to topple this regime and to establish democracy in Iran.
The NCRI has also said that the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, commanders of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), most ministers, governors and representatives of Khamenei in various parts of the country collaborate in plundering people’s properties or in wiping out the national wealth leaving the great majority of Iranian people with poverty, inflation and unemployment and no share of the nation’s wealth.
