“Yas Holding” of the IRGC’s front companies operated dozens of subsidiaries but was shut down following the revelation of dozens of case of corruption in 2017.
We are among those who wielded their sticks. It is an honor that in 1980, we were wielding sticks against Massoud Rajavi the Iranian Resistance’s Leader. We confronted his supporters at universities.
In an article, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) wrote that a 50-minute leaked audiotape of a conversation between two senior commanders of the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 2018 was a damning revelation about the regime’s massive institutionalized corruption.
Regime officials initially tried to cover up or cast doubt on the authenticity of the audio file, calling it fake and fabricated.
In the end, however, the IRGC was forced to officially confirm the authenticity of the file. Kayhan daily, the mouthpiece of regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei, claimed on February 14 that the file proved “the level of responsibility and accountability of Revolutionary Guards’ officials.”
In the tape, Mohammad Ali Jafari, then-commander of the IRGC, is heard talking to the organization’s financial chief, Brigadier General Sadeq Zolqadrnia. They discussed a 2017 corruption case involving a holding company called “Yas” (jasmine).
Yas holding was one of the IRGC’s front companies that operated dozens of subsidiaries but was shut down following the revelation of dozens of corruption cases in 2017.
Zolqadrnia accuses Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, then-mayor of Tehran and current Parliament Speaker, IRGC Coordination Deputy Jamaloddin Aberoumand, and Chief of the IRGC Intelligence Organization Hossein Taeb, as well as IRGC-Quds Force’s eliminated commander Qassem Soleimani, of covering up embezzlements worth up to 80,000 billion rials.
The amount is roughly equivalent to $3 billion based on the free market rate at the time. Yas Holding belonged to the IRGC’s Cooperative Foundation, a powerful organization that controls many components of the country’s financial resources.