PHOTO: Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s son Mehdi Hashemi (Bloomberg/Getty)
In the midst of his ongoing battle with hardliners, Iran’s former President Hashemi Rafsanjani has suffered a judicial blow, with confirmation that his son Mehdi Hashemi will serve a 10-year prison sentence.
An appellate court set the term for Mehdi Hashemi, long accused of corruption, judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei said on Thursday.
Mohseni-Ejei said the court upheld the three convictions of “embezzlement, bribery, and security issues”. He said the original sentence in March was 25 years.
Just after the disputed 2009 Presidential election, Mehdi Hashemi left Iran for Britain, where he claimed to be pursuing a Ph.D. at Oxford University. In August 2009, he was publicly condemned in the indictment of more than 100 defendants in a Tehran show trial, with the prosecutor saying that Rafsanjani’s son had tried to manipulate the vote and stir protests over the election “won” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Mehdi Hashemi returned to Tehran on September 23, 2012. He was arrested the next day but immediately released on bail.
Before and after the return, the charges were used to put political pressure was put on Rafsanjani, who antagonized many in the regime with his support of the right to protest in a Tehran Friday Prayer in July 2009. Rafsanjani’s daughter Faezeh, a women’s rights activist, was harassed, arrested for participation in a February 2011 demonstration, and eventually served a six-month prison sentence.
Although Rafsanjani has had a political recovery with the election of his protégé Hassan Rouhani as President, he caused further tension with his suggestion that the Supreme Leader’s post — after the death of Ayatollah Khamenei — could be assumed by a five-person clerical council. Hardliners and conservatives mobilized to prevent his election as head of the Assembly of Experts, which chooses and can nominally replace the Supreme Leader, in March.
The Supreme Leader issued a coded warning to Rafsanjani last week to show restraint in his public comments, invoking the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal in which Rafsanjani met President Reagan’s envoy Robert Macfarlane.
Fars News, linked to the Revolutionary Guards, immediately went on the offensive with the news of the confirmed 10-year prison term for Mehdi Hashemi: “When will the sentence be carried out?”
