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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Rafsanjani son implicated in fresh Iran trials |
| 2009-08-26 |
| [Iran Press TV] One of the defendants standing trial for Iran's post-election unrest says the son of influential official and cleric Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani asked him to embezzle government funds for his father's election campaign in 2005. During the fourth round of the mass trials held for post-election detainees, Hamzeh Karami told the court that about $2 million of the Iranian Fuel Conservation Organization's assets were used to finance Rafsanjani presidential campaign. Karami claimed that he started work at the organization in 2003 with the recommendation of Mohammad Hashemi, the brother of the former two-time president. He added that at the time the former president's son Mehdi Hashemi was the managing director of IFCO. "After that, I realized that Mehdi Hashemi's father has plans to run in the 2005 presidential election. It seemed that was why I had been invited to work there," Karami explained. "Mehdi Hashemi believed that election in Iran were financed with government funds. He did not believe in spending private savings for the election. So they step up a system for forgery and document falsification," he added. Karami also said Mehdi Hashemi was involved in money laundering. According to his statement, Karami served as a manager of political affairs for the presidential office during Mohammad Khatami's term. Following the trial, Mehdi Hashemi told Tabnak that the allegations were baseless. |
| Posted by:Fred |