The Trump administration’s latest sanctions against Iran reinstate an embargo on some of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s front companies that President Barack Obama lifted as part of the nuclear deal and could further expose the Iranian dictator’s corrupt economic empire.
Khamenei oversees a vast network of corporate and financial assets worth $200 billion, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies estimates. Trump signed an executive order this week giving the Treasury Department broad powers to sanction Khamenei, those tied to him, and anyone doing business with him.
“Today’s actions follow a series of aggressive behaviors by the Iranian regime in recent weeks, including shooting down of U.S. drones,” Trump said Monday. “The supreme leader of Iran is one who ultimately is responsible of the hostile conduct of the regime. He’s respected within his country. His office oversees the regime’s most brutal instruments including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
The three most valuable organizations in Khamenei’s financial network are the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (also known as EIKO, or Setad in Farsi), the Mostazafan Foundation, and Astan Quds Razavi. The regime consolidated these bonyads, Farsi for “foundations,” in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in which Khamenei’s predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, seized thousands of real estate assets after his followers overthrew the government of the Western-backed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Officially, the bonyads serve as the equivalent of not-for-profit organizations.
“And that also cloaked the entire enterprise with a veneer of charity and something other than just capitalism. That appealed to them,” Fred Kagan, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, told the Washington Examiner.
Today, bonyads act as fronts for massive holding companies and are run by officials handpicked by Khamenei. Of these organizations, Khamenei keeps a particularly tight grip on Setad, which saw significant growth after he was installed as supreme leader in 1989. It is believed to control assets in nearly every sector of the Iranian economy, from banks and power plants to construction and soft drinks companies, with an estimated value of $95 billion, according to a 2013 Reuters report.
A 2017 Reuters investigation found that Setad signed deals with at least five foreign companies, including a $10 billion contract with South Korean films to build oil refineries.
Setad was placed under sanctions in 2013, though Khamenei himself was not specifically targeted. The Obama administration lifted those sanctions as part of the 2015 nuclear deal. Of the 110 business and investment deals struck since then, 90 have been owned or controlled by the state, Reuters found.
Trump’s order allows the Treasury Department to seize any U.S.-based assets tied to Khamenei and target any foreign financial institution conducting business with him. Khamenei and those tied to him will also be barred from entering the United States, but experts are divided on whether these new restrictions will have an impact.
“I don’t think it will have any practical effects at all, to be honest,” Sam Dorshimer, a researcher with the Center for a New American Security, told the Washington Examiner.
He noted that Iran has been under some kind of sanction since the revolution and argued it has gotten used to doing business under them.
“The sanctions are certainly having an effect in preventing oil exports and damaging the economy, but that’s something the government and regime in Iran has dealt with in the past,” Dorshimer said. “And I think they’re pretty well prepared to deal with it again.”
Jonathan Schanzer, a former Treasury Department official and the vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, acknowledged that Iranian leaders have long avoided the U.S. financial system, making a large seizure unlikely. But he said that does not mean Trump’s new sanctions will have no effect.
“The move that he made … was really, I think, designed to shine a spotlight on something that really doesn’t get a lot of attention, and that is the corruption of the supreme leader himself,” Schanzer told the Washington Examiner.
Trump’s new sanctions give the U.S. the opportunity to expose and challenge the hypocrisy of the Iranian leadership, he said.
“[H]ere you have the Supreme Leader of Iran calling upon the Iranian people to sacrifice and endure sanctions, and he’s passing on the pain to them while enriching himself and his close associates,” said Schanzer.
