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EFTA01141247 | EFTA01141262 Last week Reuters published a three-part (six-months) investigation into the financial empire of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which was built based on billions of dollars in property seized from Iranian citizens through an organization called Setad. As a result Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei controls a business empire worth around $95 billion - a sum exceeding the value of his oil-rich nation's current annual petroleum exports. Little is known about Setad even though it is one of the keys to the Iranian leader's enduring power and now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming. Setad has built its empire on the systematic seizure of thousands of properties belonging to ordinary Iranians - members of religious minorities, Shi'ite Muslims, business people and Iranians living abroad. The Reuters investigation documents how Setad has amassed a giant portfolio of real estate by claiming in Iranian courts, sometimes falsely, that the properties are abandoned. The organization now holds a court-ordered monopoly on taldng property in the name of the supreme leader, and regularly sells the seized properties at auction or seeks to extract payments from the original owners. The organization's full name in Persian is "Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate Emam" Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam. The name refers to an edict signed by the Islamic Republic's first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death in 1989. His order spawned an entity intended to manage and sell properties abandoned in the chaotic years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. An organizational chart labeled "SETAD at a Glance," prepared in 2010 by one of Setad's companies and seen by Reuters, illustrates how big it had grown. The document shows holdings in major banks, a brokerage, an insurance company, power plants, energy and construction firms, a refinery, a cement company and soft drinks manufacturing. Today, Setad's vast operations provide an independent source of revenue and patronage for Supreme Leader Khamenei, even as the West squeezes the Iranian economy harder with sanctions in an attempt to end the nuclear-development program he controls. EFTA01141262
May 10, 2026 at 4:18 PM