Iran arrests relative of president's aid over embezzlement scandal

The Iranian prosecutor general said Tuesday that a relative of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's aid was arrested over an embezzlement scandal, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported. The prosecutor general, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, confirmed the arrest of a relative of Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, Ahmadinejad's chief of staff, said the report. Mohseni-Ejei did not elaborate on the arrest, but identified the detained person with his initials ER. According to local media reports, nearly 2.6 billion U.S. dollars was swindled out of several Iranian banks in more than two years by a company named Amir Mansour Aria, whose owner took advantage of some governmental recommendations to purchase assets of some state-owned enterprises, including Iran's second largest steel maker Khuzestan Steel Company. The reports also said that Rahim-Mashaei and some other entourages of Ahmadinejad were involved in the financial scam. But the president strongly denied this and called on the judiciary to deal firmly with people involved in the fraud. Asked why the investigation process on the scandal had taken a long time, Mohseni-Ejei said Tuesday that "this was a big corruption... We need to know that 2.6 billion U.S. dollars is not small money and the people (involved in the scandal) both did money laundering and escaped from paying taxes and heeding the laws, and this happened in collusion with some of the banks." Late October, several Iranian newspapers reported that the deputy head of Iran's Central Bank Hamid Pourmohammadi was arrested together with another banking official over the embezzlement scandal, allegedly one of the biggest fraud cases in the history of the Islamic Republic. Mohseni-Ejei, who was assigned on Sept. 15 to exclusively investigate the embezzlement case, announced that the judiciary had arrested 33 people linked to this case. The former CEO of Melli Bank, one of Iran's largest banks, have reportedly escaped to Canada after the embezzlement scandal was discovered. The government's special committee, which conducts some studies on the issue of embezzlement, has sacked the CEO of Saderat Bank Mohammad Jahromi due to the bank's failure to provide monitoring tools and management.