Page 302 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin 299

at every level of official and commercial life, from the royal court down to the
humblest clerk in the bureaucracy and the meanest shopkeeper in the suq.
Little else could have been expected when the shah himself and his family set
an example of peculation on a breathtaking scale. His father had been posses­
sed of only modest means when he came to power in 1921; but by the time of his

abdication twenty years later Reza Shah owned over 830 villages, standing on
2.5 million hectares of agricultural land. Not only was he the largest landowner
in Persia but he was the leading entrepreneur also, as a result of having insisted
that he himself should participate in every important commercial undertaking
in the country. Following his father’s example, Muhammad Reza Shah treated
Persia as his personal fief and, like him, enriched himself at his country’s
expense. The assets of the royal family were vested in and administered by the

Pahlavi Foundation, which was set up by the shah in 1958, ostensibly for
charitable purposes. The principal recipients of the charity it disbursed,
however, were the Pahlavis themselves, a family numbering several dozen
members, whose upkeep, in a style only befitting their rank and distinc­
tion, required as many millions of dollars each year as there were Pahlavi
relatives. The chief purpose of the Pahlavi Foundation was to protect and
augment the political and economic power of the shah, which was achieved by
the distribution ofpishkesh wherever it might prove advantageous, by influenc­
ing the direction taken by the Persian economy and by investing in profitable

ventures at home and abroad. Most of the charitable activities supported by the
foundation were, in fact, paid for out of state revenues.
Just how large the assets of the Pahlavi Foundation were there is no way of
knowing with any exactness, for its affairs were, as far as possible, shrouded in
secrecy. They could not have been less, however, it has been estimated, than
$3,000 million, of which the shah’s personal share is said to have been around
$1,000 million. For all his insistence upon the necessity to give priority to
industrial expansion, the shah did not hazard the Pahlavi fortunes by investing

in heavy industry. That risk was to be borne by the state treasury. Instead, the
Pahlavi Foundation directed the greater part of the funds it invested in Persia
into activities promising quick returns or a rapid appreciation of capital -
banking, insurance, speculative urban construction, cement and building
materials, hotels, sugar factories, casinos and tourist resorts. One of the more
bizarre projects, in which S AVAK, the security force, had the majority share,
was the development, at a cost of more than $100 million, of a luxurious
holiday resort on Kish island (oft the Persian coast of the Gulf), where the rich
and privileged of Persia might take their ease and indulge their fancies, most of

which were obligingly imported from Europe. Abroad, the Pahlavi Founda­
tion s known investments — what others there may have been can only be
guessed at - included a new skyscraper in New York and a property develop­
ment scheme in New Orleans. How these exotic ventures were meant to benefit
e Persian economy, which had, in the last analysis, provided the original