Iran International
A scandal over a foreign trip by family of Iran’s conservative parliament speaker has turned into one of the hottest topics on Persian-language social media.
"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.
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”.
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.
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.
Twitter users in Iran reported that some employees also gathered at the ministry's parking area and courtyard chanting slogans against Labor Minister Hojjat Abdolmaleki who had told the press in February that he had fired over 1,000 employees.
Pictures of the protest published by Iranian news outlets including Rouydad24 website, show the employees waiting for the minister to come forward and answer their questions. However, he did not leave his office at the ministry.
Employees also accused Abdolmaleki of launching a publicity to show off his "achievements" despite criticisms by staff and the media over his populist behavior. Some Twitter user published a publicity poster, adding that Abdolmaleki has used the ministry's funds to showcase his performance. Several members of the Iranian parliament have said that Abdolmaleki will be one of the first Raisi ministers to be impeached as soon as the parliament’s leadership allows impeachment motions to be tabled and go forward.
Reports from Tehran say Deputy Labor Minister Mohammad Reza Hosseini tried to calm the protestors, but his effort was not successful. The employees chanted "Payments with Justice" demanding fair pay.
One employee told Rouydad24: "It is ironic that the staff of other government and private companies come to the labor ministry to voice their grievances while its own employees have nowhere to go to seek relief for their grievances."
Another employee asked: "How can the labor minister manage the situation of unemployment in the country while he cannot sort out the problems in his own ministry?" He reminded that Abdolmaleki promised to quickly create millions of jobs in Iran at low cost, but it never materialized.
Other employees criticized the minister and his aides for putting on a show rather than working to solve staff problems. One employee told reporters that Abdolmaleki made no plans to tackle unemployment in Iran since he assumed office eight months ago. Earlier, Abdolmaleki had said in an odd comment that "Creating jobs was not among the responsibilities of the labor ministry."
Criticism of other economic ministers of the Raisi administration has also been on the rise during the past months. Lawmaker Behrouz Mohebbi on Tuesday harshly criticized Industry Minister Reza Fatemi Amin who is also on the parliament's impeachment list, charging that he has not met any one of the many promises he made before joining the government.
Mohebbi further charged that the managers of car manufacturing companies affiliated with the Ministry of Industry drive foreign cars and do not care about the rising price and falling quality of Iranian-made cars. "If they used Iranian cars, they would have made efforts to improve the quality of domestic products at least for their families' safety," he said.
Mohebbi also criticized the minister for failing to control the car market. According to the media last week, the price of a basic old model compact car called Pride, rose by 400 million rials ($1,600) overnight and reached 2 trillion rials.
Mohebbi said, "when Fatemi Amin's credentials were being reviewed at the parliament, he promised to put an end to the monopoly of the two car makers affiliated with the ministry, to boost production and to improve quality. Some eight months on, none of these promises have materialized." He reminded Fatemi Amin that even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has acknowledged that people are unhappy about his ministry's performance.