Foundations Run by Khamenei’s Powerful Relative Receive Over $8 million from State Budget Annually
Two institutions controlled by the influential politician Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, namely the Academy of Persian Language and Literature and the Saadi Foundation, receive more money from the national budget than most universities and research institutes, Iran Open Data research shows.
These two institutions have received nearly 530 billion Tomans ($8.9 million, at an exchange rate of 59,400 Tomans/$1). Adjusted for inflation, this is nearly 1.75 trillion tomans (over $29 million)from the national budget since 2012.
Haddad Adel is one of the most influential politicians in the Islamic Republic. He also is a relative of Ali Khamenei. He has been the speaker of the parliament and a member of the Expediency Discernment Council and Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. In recent years, he has played a significant role in organizing electoral lists of conservative groups close to the Supreme Leader.
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Due to incomplete information in the public version of the 2022 budget, the Saadi Foundation's budget is unknown. For the above graphs, the Saadi Foundation’s budget has been calculated by averaging its 2023 & 2021 budgets.
According to its constitution, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is “the highest policy-making body for Persian language and literature” and its most important tasks are the “preservation of Persian linguistic and literary heritage” and “establishing word-making and word-selection task forces”. Despite the fact that the members of the academy are mainly linguists and writers, Haddad Adel's education, as the head of this institution, is in physics and philosophy.
The Saadi Foundation’s constitution has been approved by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in 2010. This foundation facilitates research about and teaching of the Persian language abroad. Instead of being a subdivision of the government, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this organization operates under the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization. The Saadi Foundation appears to operate under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, but in reality, it is among the institutions under the direct supervision of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.
No financial or administrative documents are available for these two institutions, but a deeper dive into Iran’s 2022 budget reveals they receive more public funds than most universities and academic and research institutes.
As an example, the graph below compares the budget of these two organizations with the budget lines for three specialized research institutions.
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