Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: Iran’s underestimated chief cleric

(Image credit: Iranian Leader Press Office/Anadolu via Getty Images)

In January 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran with “his wife, some jewels and a clod of earth”, says author Christopher de Bellaigue in the Financial Times. A measure of how the country’s Islamic revolution has devoured itself is that today’s revolutionaries “have been shouting for the son of the man their parents once deposed”. Iranians haven’t become monarchists – they are simply seeking anyone who can replace a despotic regime at war with its own people.

“The author” of last month’s carnage – the worst in the bloody regime’s 47-year history – is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: an uncharismatic and consistently underestimated cleric who succeeded his revolutionary mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, on the latter’s death in 1989. Khamenei is the regime’s “great survivor”, says The Economist. Yet, at 86, he is ailing. Even before the recent uprising threw Iran’s future in doubt, speculation was whirring about the succession – with many insiders tipping Khamenei’s second son Mojtaba, also a cleric, as the likely candidate. But if Khamenei ever harboured dreams of a dynasty, recent events could scupper his plans. All the more so if they reveal to ordinary Iranians the extent of his family’s domestic and international business empire.

Born in 1939, one of eight children of a poor religious scholar from the north-east of Iran, Khamenei followed in his father’s footsteps and went to study in the city of Qom, the pre-eminent place of Shia scholarship. Alongside reading the Koran, he listened to music, recited poetry and read novels such as Les Misérables and The Grapes of Wrath, depicting secular struggles against oppression. He also took an interest in thinkers who “sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create a new ideology”, translating some of the works of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary, into Persian. Imprisoned repeatedly by the Shah’s security services, Khamenei swiftly rose up the hierarchy of the radical regime that seized power, surviving an assassination attempt that deprived him of the use of an arm. A canny consolidator of power, a key power base was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

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Khamenei, who lives in a compound with his family on Tehran’s Palestine Street, has “always stressed his humble lifestyle”, says The Guardian. “His reputation for modesty, which contrasts with the ostentatious wealth of many other officials, has deflected some popular anger.” But sceptics doubt “whether his asceticism is quite as authentic as presented”. Within Iran, Iran’s supreme leader heads one of the country’s wealthiest organisations, created through the seizure of thousands of properties and assets after the revolution, says Bloomberg. Known as Setad, it manages billions of dollars-worth of commercial holdings, in sectors ranging from insurance to energy and telecoms.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's empire is under threat

The overseas empire headed by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is more modest. But it’s nonetheless a substantial affair, “embracing everything from Persian Gulf shipping to Swiss bank accounts and British luxury property worth in excess of £100million”. None of the assets is listed in Khamenei’s name – his interests are concealed by “layers of shell companies”. But many purchases appear in the name of a crucial middleman, Ali Ansari – a prominent tycoon with connections to the family, who has just been sanctioned by the UK. Ansari is best known for presiding over the Ayandeh Bank, a private lender that collapsed last year, “engulfed in allegations around insider lending”.

The Khamenei family might have banked on their overseas assets as “some kind of rainy day fund” in case they had to leave Iran in a hurry, says Bloomberg. The UK decision to sanction Ansari – and freeze some of those assets – has rather complicated the plan.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.