At the end of the Majlis session on August 13, 2010, Mehdi Pour Fatemi, the Dashti and Tangestan representative in the 8th Majlis, said, “The government has until now given 21 billion dollars to domestic contractors to start up the South Pars [oil field]. It was agreed that 90,000 people would be employed in the South Pars projects, and that 15,000 of those workers be from Bushehr province. Now that domestic newspapers did all their big publicity about this project’s ability to create jobs, the people—especially the youth—of the province want to know where is the 21 billion dollars, and what happened to the jobs?”
The figure which the Majlis representative mentioned was fixed during the Ahmadinejad government by companies associated with the Seal of the Prophets Military Base, which in turn is associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It is really the IRGC commanders who must answer to the people where the money has gone. Yet these commanders answer questions with bullets, arrest, and prison. Supervisory bodies of this budget, such as the Planning Organization, were dissolved by the Ahmadinejad government so that no authority stands to supervise and answer questions.