Scandal Offers Iran Hardliners A Shot At Top Parliament Post

"Layette-gate" and "Ghalibaf" rose to the top five hottest Persian Twitter hashtags on Wednesday and have remained there since it was revealed that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s wife, daughter and son-in-law had returned from a "layette-shopping" trip to Turkey with massive extra luggage including a baby bed and stroller which they could easily find in Tehran.

Critics accuse Ghalibaf of hypocrisy for admonishing others for luxury and telling Iranians they should support domestically made products, and telling those who are suffering economic hardships to be patient, when his own family travels abroad to buy luxury products.

In a tweet Wednesday, Mohammad Parsi, journalist, said those like Ghalibaf who promote domestic production, particularly of cars -- despite their very low safety standards resuting in thousands of deaths every year -- are not even prepared to buy their grandchildren's strollers in Iran.

Others have asked Ghalibaf how his family could afford luxury layette-shopping abroad if all that he and his family members own is the very modest assets he declared when running for president in 2017.

Ghalibaf’s son and allies argue that he should not be held responsible for his daughter's "mistake". One of the Twitterati reminded them that this was not the case when hardliners of the Guardian Council excluded former Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani from the presidential elections because his daughter had lived and studied abroad.

Mostafa Faghihi, the editor of Entekhab, a news website close to Rouhani, in a tweet Wednesday referred to the rumors apparently propagated by Ghalibaf allies that his ultra-hardliner rivals in the parliament, the Paydari Front, may be using the scandal to oust him as speaker to drown "the people's voice". "It makes me laugh! One asks what good these imaginary voices have done for people?"

The news of the scandal has spread far and wide among Iranians. On Thursday teachers chanted against Ghalibaf in rallies they held in cities and towns across the country in protest to their low salaries. "One layette set less could solve our problems," teachers chanted in Isfahan.

Media controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, IRGC rushed to Ghalibaf’s defense. Javan newspaper on Thursday claimed that such allegations were "cowardly" attempts to "destroy" the parliament speaker's reputation and influence the outcome of upcoming elections of the Parliament's presidium.

Fars news agency, another IRGC-linked media outlet, also denied the truth of "layette-shopping" and said it had made enquiries from the airline and confirmed that the Ghalibaf family had had no extra luggage upon their return to Tehran.

Relatively independent media, however, strongly criticized Ghalibaf and even called for his resignation. The reformist Aftab newspaper on Thursday ran three separate articles on the "layette-gate" story including one with the headline, "Mr. Ghalibaf, Resignation Please".

"It will be written in history books that the wife and daughter of this country's parliament speaker went layette-shopping in Turkey when Iranian people were struggling to feed themselves," Aftab said in one article and reminded Ghalibaf of his own attacks on rival politicians in the past for similar luxury.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s wife, daughter and son-in-law arrived at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport on Tuesday from Istanbul with apparently a large layette set they bought from Turkey. People at the airport didn’t recognize them at first but when a photo of the family circulated on social media, their identity was revealed, followed by a barrage of criticism, and resurfacing of other alleged corruption cases against the family.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf became parliament speaker in 2020 after 'revolutionary principlists' or hardliners swept an engineered election, when most reformists were banned from running as candidates.

The harsh reaction to the incident is because of the hardship most Iranian face with 40-percent inflation and an eight-fold drop in the value of the national currency, impoverishing tens of millions of middle-class people.

Something that added to the controversy was a video of Ghalibaf in the 2017 presidential debates in which he censured a former minister for traveling to Italy to buy baby clothes. “You people think our economy will get better, never!” Ghalibaf is heard saying in the video.

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The word for the layette in Persian is ‘sismuni’ a relic of Sanskrit that has survived in the language from Old Persian. Social media users have added the suffix for political scandals “gate” to it and are sharing the hashtag ‘SismuniGate’ in reference to the Watergate scandal.

In reaction to the latest chapter of Ghalibafs’ scandals, many activists and officials have called for the resignation of the parliament speaker. Reformist political commentator Abbas Abdi, however, says the news is so devastating that as a matter of principle he must resign from all his positions, but his replacement will definitely be worse than him. “So, I do not suggest resignation” he added.

The more important issue here is contradictory behavior by officials, he said, noting that “These paradoxes are not limited to this small case that has been exposed. It has destroyed almost all areas of Iran’s political and social life”.

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Another civil activist, Vahid Ashtari, referring to government policies said it is not possible to preach to people to buy Iranian-made cars and other products, ban the import of home appliances, and send your family to Turkey to buy ‘sismuni’.

University professor and political activist Rahmatollah Bigdeli called for Ghalibaf’s to step aside, saying, "Only Ghalibaf's resignation will erase this stain”.

Ghalibaf's son Elias, criticized the trip by his sister, and said, “My sister and her husband did something that is absolutely wrong, especially in the current economic situation people face”. However, he added his father shouldn’t be judged by the actions of his sister, something also echoed by his media assistant, Mohammad Saeed Ahadian.

Ghalibaf is a household name in many corruption cases in the Islamic Republic. During his term as mayor of the capital Tehran, several of his deputies and people in his close circle were sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison but the judiciary never prosecuted him, maybe because he is a close relative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

During the same period, Ghalibaf handed over lands with a total area of 71,397 square meters to his wife’s charity institute in 2011, apart from another 2.5 trillion rials, nearly $100 million at the time.

An audio file of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commanders discussing massive financial corruption that leaked in February also directly involved Ghalibaf.

Some Iranian social media users say the country’s push to restrict the internet in Iran is aimed at preventing the exposure of such scandals by the Islamic Republic’s authorities and their families – especially their relatives who have been making the best use of their position since President Ebrahim Raisi took office.

Lawmaker Mansour Haghighatpour said on Tuesday that Faezeh Hashemi has crossed the Islamic Republic's "red lines" and "trampled on the country's values and national interests. So much leniency emboldens people like her. I believe that the Islamic Republic must take appropriate punitive action against Faezeh Hashemi and discipline her," he said.

Hashemi is the daughter of former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and a member of the Central Council of the pro-reform Kargozaran-e Sazandegi (Executives of Construction) Party.

Fars news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard on Tuesday called Hashemi a "foot soldier" of the United States while another IRGC-affiliated media outlet, Javan newspaper dubbed her "flagrant" and criticized her party and the Rafsanjani clan for not officially renouncing her.

Hashemi had said during a discussion on the social media app Clubhouse on April 16 that removing the IRGC from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) was not in Iran's interest.

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Hashemi had argued it is possible that certain factions in the IRGC may be intentionally taking actions to keep the whole entity on the US terrorist list. She cited IRGC's missile attack on Iraq's Kurdish regional capital of Erbil in March and criticized the Guards for boasting about the attack instead of keeping a profile as the country’s defender, posing no threat to others in the region.

She also said the IRGC is constantly broadening both the sphere and scope of its activities in Iran’s economy and politics, making it even harder to stick to its military role. “The only way for the IRGC to return to the barracks is to keep them on the [FTO] sanctions list,” she said.

This is not the first time in recent years that Hashemi has ventured into criticizing the Iranian regime’s core values or positions, espoused by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his hardliner supporters. In January, she said the Islamic Republic was responsible in the killing half a million Syrians with its military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Hardliner social media users have accused Hashemi of being a traitor to the country, while others including some anti-regime activists have said that her criticism of the regime could only be acceptable when she also admits her father's role in engineering the selection of Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader in 1989, and later allowing the IRGC to assume an economic role.

Abdolreza Davari, one of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's advisors and confidants said Hashemi was wrong to say the IRGC should not be delisted and considered her remarks "against national security" but defended her right to freedom of expression. "Why should she and her late father be subjected to so many threats, accusations, and abuse instead of her remarks being logically criticized?" Davari tweeted.

Faezeh Hashemi is perhaps the most controversial of Hashemi-Rafsanjani's five children and often targeted by hardliners for her candid criticism of the regime, compulsory hijab, and prosecution of followers of the banned Baha'i faith. She is also the former president of Women's Sports Federation and editor-in-chief of banned reformist Zan newspaper.

Hashemi has been prosecuted for her activities on several occasions and served two six-month prison sentences for "propaganda against the state" and similar charges in 2012 and 2017.

According To Jahan-e Sanaat newspaper in Tehran, disagreements between parliament (Majles) and President Ebrahim Raisi are mainly in four areas: A controversial petrochemical plant, a bill to restrict internet access, discontinuing cheap dollars for essential imports and the motions planned by a sizeable group of lawmakers to unseat Raisi's economic ministers.

The petrochemical plant, that is still being built despite strong opposition by Raisi and his Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, is a project that has faced strong opposition by locals and environmentalists. The location in northern Iran by the Caspian Sea is near a natural reserve which is ecologically vulnerable, and the area is too densely populated for a project whose first outcome for the region will be pollution.

Widespread opposition to the project has reached a sensitive point as media has revealed that the man behind the project is allegedly a corrupt individual who has borrowed money from state banks under two different identities and has refused to pay back a $50-million loan after many years.

The only top official who has supported the project in public is Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf who is now quietly at loggerheads with Raisi over the issue.

The second area of disagreement is a bill to restrict internet access which particularly targets foreign social media platforms. The bill is ironically called "The Protection Bill" as its advocates claim that is meant to protect users from the perils of social media.

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Raisi opposes the bill mainly because he knows that there are 1.7 million small businesses active on Instagram that provide jobs to around nine million Iranians. Banning access to social media will add those nine million to millions of other hungry bellies Raisi has to feed.

Some have said that Raisi also knows the country still lacks the infrastructure to replace the Internet with a local intranet network. So, he fears that the state’s administrative, financial and health systems as well as many public services might collapse and create even more problems for a government that already faces a host of hard issues.

The third disagreement between the Majles and the administration is the preferential rate of 42,000 rials per US dollar allocated for importing essential food and medicine. Lawmakers, who have come on board claiming to be revolutionaries, believe this is the only area they can have an impact by cutting a major source of potential corruption by individuals who have misused the cheap dollars to make profits in businesses that have nothing to do with essential imports.

Here too, Raisi knows that cutting off the subsidy will further increase the cost of living and will land his administration in trouble by creating the risk of street protests.

Finally, is the motion planned by over 50 of parliament's lawmakers to impeach Raisi's economic ministers including Industry Minister Reza Fatemi Amin and Labor Minister Hojjat Abdolmaleki who are believed to be his most vulnerable aides. Political circles in Tehran seem to be quite certain that the industry minister will be leaving the administration during the coming weeks.

These are only the main outstanding problems between the Majles and Raisi. Other problems such as the claim by some lawmakers that the administration has kept them in the dark about the nuclear negotiations also make matters worse, if lawmakers conclude that Raisi is in a weak position.

Javan newspaper linked with the Revolutionary Guard carried an editorial on April 14 criticizing Raisi's latest order to lower rising prices.

The president, seeming incapable of controlling consumer inflation, had called on government watchdogs to look "behind the scenes” to find the culprits he called the mafia. Javan pointed out that the "Mafia has infiltrated the body of the government and culprits for rising prices were in fact Raisi's own colleagues in his administration."

The daily further warned that if there is a hidden hand behind the scenes, it means the government is not in control of the country's economy.

The editorial insisted that the administration has a contract with the nation, made promises, accepted responsibility and created some expectations, but it has taken too long, and nothing has been accomplished.

The newspaper also questioned why there are so many mafias in the economy, including the car mafia, the medicine mafia, the potato mafia and so on. It charged that no mafia can exist without infiltrating the body of the government. It concluded, "So, the mafia is the same as the government's managers!"

The IRGC-linked paper then called on Raisi to uproot these mafias based in government buildings in the same way one would uproot the weeds in a garden.

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While Javan criticized Raisi, it is well known that the IRGC is a major player in the economy, having been accused repeatedly of building up a business empire through its political influence and hidden networks.

In another development, former lawmaker Mansoor Haghighatpoor told Khabar Online website that Raisi was not involved in choosing his cabinet ministers and others did it for him. He did not name the "others" but vaguely referred to them as "pressure groups who did their job independent of Raisi's will.”

Like the Javan editorial, the former MP said that Raisi has failed to solve major problems facing the country, and now the people expect him to solve small problems such as potato and tomato shortages.

Haghighatpoor said that one of Raisi’s biggest problems is lack of expertise among his ministers.

He said everyone knew during the June 2021 presidential election that the candidates who were barred from running for president had far better qualifications than those who were approved – including Raisi.

Referring to intractable problems such as rising prices and unemployment, Haghighatpoor said he was sure Raisi will soon start to reshuffle his cabinet.

Politicians on social media were also certain during the weekend that Industry Ministry Reza Fatemi Amin and Labor Minister Hojjat Abdolmaleki will have to leave the Raisi administration soon.

This comes while several members of the parliament, including Jalal Mahmoudzadeh, a lawmaker for Mahabad have said that the Majles presidium has so far prevented lawmakers from tabling the impeachment motion to dismiss quite a few cabinet ministers.

Although over 50 Iranian lawmakers have long called for the impeachment of ministers in Raisi's economic team, Raisi has not commented on the matter.

Another person who is silent about general dissatisfaction with the government is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who has maintained public silence.

A few political activists such as reformist commentator Javad Emam have said that changing the ministers will not make the situation any better as everyone else in Raisi's circle of friends and acquaintances also lacks executive experience and a thorough understanding of the country's economic problems.