Majlis and Administration Battle Over Saeed Mortezavi

Roozonline -- Saeed Mortezavi was until recently Iran’s notorious prosecutor for Tehran who has earned the resentment of the country’s civil society and human rights groups because of his aggressive prosecutorial practices. But he also has enemies inside the regime. He was removed from his position as prosecutor of Tehran, a position that also made him responsible for a number of prisons including the notorious Kahrizak prison in Tehran that was announced as an unacceptable facility.

But Mortezavi’s departure as the prosecutor did not end his career as he was then appointed as the executive director of the social security fund by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A group of Majlis representatives have raised their opposition to this appointment and have threatened to summon his boss, the minister of labor, to parliament to respond to their questions. True to form, Ahmadinejad has responded by threatened to appoint Mortezavi as the care taker of the ministry of labor if the representatives went ahead with their summons.

In this regard, Mohammad-Reza Bahonar, a deputy Majlis speaker, revealed that a summons of the minister of labor, Abdolreza Sheikh-ol-Islam, had been submitted to the Majlis speaker “informally.” The Majlis is currently in recess and is expected to register the summons when it reconvenes.

In the meantime, Sheikh-ol-Islam has implicitly backed up Mortezavi’s appointment and said, “Every public figure has supporters and opponents and we live in a free and open society, and will look at all aspects of the situation.”

Prior to his current appointment as the direct of the social security fund, Mortezavi had been appointed as the head of the committee to combat contraband and unlawful foreign exchange activities.

As his key supporters, Ahmadinejad had engaged in some very harsh attacks on those who criticized the ex-prosecutor and his appointment to the fund. One of Mortezavi’s advisors Ali Akbar Heydarifar, had also said that he would confront that media which had opposed the ex-prosecutor’s appointment to the fund and had accused the media of being affiliated to “financial centers” and therefore felt threatened by Mortezavi’s new post and mission. Heydarifar himself is one of the three judges in the Kahrizak prison case – which had prisoners who had been sentenced by Mortezavi – who had been suspended from the case.

Parviz Soroori, the head of the internal security committee of the eight Majlis (the current Majlis is the ninth) had warned that Mortezavi’s appointment to the social security fund would create problems for the minister of labor, because the fund is under the purview of the labor ministry.

Prior to all of this, Mortezavi had been identified as an accuser in the Kahrizak prison case following suspicious deaths at the facility. He had announced last year that he had been found not guilty in the case, which was denied immediately by the spokesperson of the judiciary. On February 13 this year, Mohseni Ejhei told reporters that the case against Mortezavi had been dropped.

Tabnak website belonging to former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezai recently announced that Mortezavi had been found an accomplice in the case and would therefore be tried soon.

Mortezavi of course is not the only appointee of Ahmadinejad who is under attack by principlist ideologues and the attacks are not new but have a long history. What is changing is that since Ahmadinejad has been weakened, because of his differences with ayatollah Khamenei, attacks on his allies and appointees have been on the rise.