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Eurasia
January 26, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
Iran's Revolutionary Guard ordered to sell off parts of financial empire
bne IntelliNews
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other branches of the military have been or- dered to sell off business holdings and commer- cial assets “irrelevant” to their main function.
Although usually thought of as a branch of the Iranian armed forces charged with protecting Iran's Islamic system, the IRGC also essentially runs a financial empire with holdings in the coun- try's construction, energy, banking, insurance and telecommunications industries, among others. There are no reliable estimates of what share of Iranian GDP can be attributed to this economic powerhouse but analysts usually place it some- where between one and two-thirds of national output.
Iran's Defence Minister, Brigadier-General Amir Hatami, reportedly told local media that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has instructed all of Iran’s armed forces to either divest economic holdings on the country’s capital market or sell them to the private sector.
“They will pursue this matter until these forces withdraw from irrelevant economic activities,” Hatami reportedly said.
President Hassan Rouhani has been trying to scale back the economic involvement of the Guard since he first took office in 2013. He has made little progress with the policy, but if the back-
ing of Khamenei turns out to be solid, that could change, Foad Izadi, assistant professor at the
The Revolutionary Guard has been told to stick more to what it knows best.
Faculty of World Studies at Tehran University told Bloomberg.
Interestingly, the call to divest holdings of what some critics have described as “a business con- glomerate with guns” comes just a few weeks after nationwide anti-establishment demonstra- tions—variously featuring protests against eco- nomic hardship, a lack of civil rights and unac- countable power structures in Iran—shook the country. Whether the instructions on business assets issued to the military is part of the estab- lishment’s response to that unrest is unclear, but the IRGC will certainly not want to be seen to be moving out of any business fields related to the state or national security where observers could make the case that the move is in some way re- lated to the pressure of US sanctions.
Among the holdings of the Guard – which have been harried by the US with sanctions for decades – is one of Iran’s largest construction companies, the Khatam al Anbia Construction Headquarters. It has a workforce of tens of thousands and has been contracted to build some of the state's big- gest oil and gas projects.
If fairly pursued, the Khamenei decree on as- sets held by the military would suggest that huge swathes of the economy could come under pri- vate or semi-private ownership. However, many Iranians remain sceptical that that could ever be the case. They suggest that any divestments will not benefit the real private sector and will instead