Mahafarid Amir Khosravi, an Iranian billionaire arrested for allegedly perpetrating a $2.6 billion dollar bank fraud, was hanged on Saturday after a swift court decision to impose the death penalty. The decision was so sudden Khosravi's lawyer told Iranian media that no one had told him the execution had been scheduled.
According to the Associated Press,
Iranian state television reported that the Iranian Supreme Court upheld
a death sentence handed down in a case in which 39 individuals were
found guilty of a large-scale fraud. Khosravi was summarily executed for "corruption
on earth ... through bribery and money laundering." Khosravi and the
three others sentenced to death in the conspiracy are alleged to have
forged documents to improve their credit and receive loans from major
Iranian banks. Those loans were later used to invest in state-owned
companies. While many others were accused of being involved in the scam,
Khosravi was accused of leading and organizing the fraud.
The scandal was the largest of its kind in post-Revolutionary Iran
and threatened at one point to engulf the government itself. The Iranian
Parliament called on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
to testify in a government investigation on the case in 2011 and how it
may have affected the strength of corporate entities run by the
government into which the bankers had invested. Ultimately, the
President was not found to have had a broad role in the case, and
prosecutors continued to focus on the leaders of the scheme.
The execution was so sudden that Khosravi's
lawyer, Gholam Ali Riahi, told media outlets that he was not informed
that his client would be executed during the weekend. According to the UK's Independent, Riahi told khabaronline.ir,
an online news outlet in the country, that "he had not been informed of
the execution" and that all of his client's assets were "at the
disposal of the prosecutor's office."
Khosravi is one of four individuals sentenced to death over the scandal. This year, Amnesty International condemned Iran as one of the nations with the highest number of executions in the world,
along with Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In 2013, Iran reported 369
executions, an increase from the year before, but Amnesty researchers
noted that investigations had led them to tally the total number of
killings to 704, including unreported executions. Researchers at Amnesty
International believe that China has the highest number of annual
executions, but given the lack of official data on state behavior, there
is no way to prove just how many people are killed by the Chinese
government annually.
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