Iran’s supreme court upholds tycoon’s death sentence for graft
US-Iranian, wife in Iran jail, no charges since July: rights group
DUBAI, Dec 3, (RTRS): Iran’s supreme court has upheld the death penalty against Iranian businessman Babak Zanjani for corruption, the judiciary said on Saturday, a sentence critics say will mask the identity of senior officials who supported him.
By his own account, Zanjani had for years helped circumvent sanctions by arranging billions of dollars of oil deals through a network of companies stretching from Turkey to Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.
Prosecutors accused Zanjani of owing the government more than $2.7 billion for oil sold on behalf of the oil ministry. He was sentenced in March.
Critics of the sentence, including President Hassan Rouhani, said Zanjani’s execution might make it impossible to recover the funds and uncover the identity of officials who supported him.
Judiciary deputy head Gholamreza Ansari, quoted by the body’s official news website Mizan, said the court affirmed the death sentence against Zanjani, while death sentences against two co-defendants were revoked. Zanjani amassed a fortune of $10 billion, along with debts of a similar scale, the tycoon once told an Iranian magazine.
At the time of his arrest in Dec 2013, a judicial spokesman said: “He received funds from certain bodies ... and received oil and other shipments and now has not returned the funds”. Iran emerged from years of economic isolation in January when world powers led by the United States and the European Union lifted crippling sanctions against Tehran in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Meanwhile, an American-Iranian dual national and his wife have been in detention in Iran without charge or access to lawyers since their arrest by elite Revolutionary Guards in July, a New Yorkbased rights group said on Friday.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) said Karan Vafadari and his wife Afarin Niasari, who run an art gallery in Tehran, were being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
The Islamic Republic does not recognise dual nationality, a position that prevents Western embassy officials from visiting such detainees. “Yet another case of a dual national snatched and held without charge or access to a lawyer represents an alarming continuation of a judicial system run by intelligence agencies with no respect for the law and no accountability,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the human rights group. The statement said families of the arrested couple decided not to publicize their cases, hoping it would be resolved.
“Then when the family started receiving anonymous phone threats and demands for money, they decided to go public and write a letter to Iran’s supreme leader,” the statement said.
In the letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Vafadari’s Washington-based sister Kateh said her sister-in-law was detained at Tehran airport as she was about to board a flight to attend a family wedding abroad, the statement said.
“She was told to call her husband and ask him to come to the airport. When he arrived, he, too, was arrested and both were taken to Evin Prison.” There was no immediate Iranian comment on the human rights group report.
US State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a news briefing on Friday that US officials were aware of reports that a US citizen and US permanent resident had been detained in Iran, but he declined to comment further.
In August, Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi was quoted in Iranian media as saying that two Iranian dual nationals had been arrested the previous week, linking them to a home that had hosted mixed-gender parties for foreign diplomats.