Accusations of corruption against Iranian first vice president Mohammad Reza Rahimi have gathered unprecedented backing in parliament and threaten to taint President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim to be fighting graft and running a clean government.

Rahimi, who heads the government’s anti-corruption task force, was not named when the head of the judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, announced on March 7 that a major corruption ring had been broken up.  “By forging judicial and state documents, the members of this ring stole millions of dollars… and one of them alone embezzled six million dollars,” he said in a statement.

Conservative lawmaker Elias Naderan later linked the announcement to Rahimi, who he said was the head of the “Fatemi Street Ring”, all of whose members except Rahimi had been arrested. “To exempt someone [from punishment] for having executive responsibilities is neither fair nor righteous,” he said.

Rahimi has denied wrongdoing. "I was always the protector of the.. treasury but now some malicious and undiscerning people do not want to let me to fight corruption. They want to instill doubts into people's mind that their government is not clean," he said.

In the meantime, 216 members of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, said in an open letter to Larijani, “Certain individuals in high executive positions have played a more significant role than the detained members of this ring. It is expected of your excellency and the legal system of the country not to allow the weak to be trampled upon.” 

The Parlemannews website, which is run by the reformist minority bloc in the Majlis, claimed the chief executive of an insurance company along with a number of senior government officials and staff are also involved in the scandal.

The lawmakers on April 4 sent Larijani a second letter signed by 233 of them, saying, “Based on convincing reports received [by us] pressure has been mounting on you with regard to fighting the corruption of some big fish.”

Rahimi has also been named by other conservative and influential members of the Majlis including Ali Motahari and Mohammad Dehqan. Motahari, whose late father is considered one of the ideologues of the Islamic Republic said, “Ahmadinejad should be the first to take action against Rahimi.”

High-ranking members of the Ahmadinejad administration, however, have defended Rahimi. Top adviser Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, considered among the closest politicians to Ahmadinejad, said the accusations against Rahimi were aimed at tarnishing the government and preventing it from carrying out its main responsibility.

Another Ahmadinejad deputy, Fatemeh Bodaghi, announced that the government had lodged a complaint against Naderan for making false accusations.

The case against Rahimi was confirmed on April 8 by Dehqan, a member of the presiding board of the Majlis, who said Naderan’s claims were based on the contents of an actual judicial case.

Larijani appeared to backtrack somewhat on April 11, leaving the state of the investigation unclear. Without directly referring to the charges made against Rahimi by lawmakers, he said using public forums and media outlets to make accusations is morally and religiously wrong, against the law and considered a crime.

Meanwhile, the Jaras website, which is run by a group of exiled reformists and former officials, said in a report that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wants the Rahimi investigation stopped.

It is not the first time Rahimi’s name has been linked with corruption charges. In the second half of 2009, he was summoned by a criminal court for “amassing illicit wealth” and “illegal use of state assets”. He failed to appear and the fate of the case remains uncertain.

Also conservative member of parliament Alireza Zakani, along with Naderan and Ahmad Tavakoli, the influential head of the Majlis Research Centre, have lodged a complaint accusing Rahimi of forging his PhD degree.

Rahimi has said the accusations are politically motivated and he will answer his accusers at an appropriate time. Despite several requests, he has never publicly shown his PhD certificate to resolve the problem.

In 2008, Ahmadinejad’s interior minister, Ali Kordan, was impeached in the Majlis for forging a PhD degree from Oxford University. At the time, Rahimi – who was vice president for legal and parliamentary affairs - distributed 5,000 dollar cheques among lawmakers as “mosque donations” and in return allegedly received confirmation that they had withdrawn support for Kordan’s impeachment.

This incident even drew a severe reaction from the hardline Keyhan daily, which described it as a political scam. Rahimi said that the cheques had nothing to do with Kordan’s impeachment and it was just a coincidence.

Rahimi is also accused of tampering with the 1997 presidential election vote result in Kurdistan province where he was governor. In that election, reformiscandidate Mohammad Khatami won an overwhelming victory across the country; however, in Kurdistan, where Khatami was expected to be the leading contender, conservative candidate Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri came out on top.

Furthermore, Rahimi is said to have escaped investigation on other charges, including alleged involvement with the drug trafficking mafia in Kurdistan when he was governor of the province from 1993 to 1997. According to some local sources, Kurdistan witnessed a surge in the number of drug addicts during Rahimi’s governorship.

Rahimi has never reacted to any of the allegations relating to his governorship.

Between 2005 and 2007, Rahimi was the head of the National Audit Court, which is tasked with looking into the financial wrongdoing of government organs. Some lawmakers accuse Rahimi of making erroneous reports about individuals and companies, thereby inflicting economic loss and causing administrative disorder when he held that post.

One report about the state-owned Iran Insurance Company – the biggest insurer in the country – led to the removal of the then head of the company by Ahmadinejad. It was later found that the report was false.

Rahimi has defended his performance as head of the National Audit Court and said that he had caught many corrupt individuals.

With the restoration of relative calm in the country, Ahmadinejad’s conservative critics are increasingly lashing out at him over the government’s incompetence. This point was raised by Ali Motahari in an open letter to Mir-Hossein Mousavi –the main opposition leader – in February. He called on Mousavi to call a halt to anti-government protests, so that by lowering political tensions, lawmakers would eventually no longer fear calling the government to account for evading the law and making mistakes.

If Rahimi is not taken to court, Ahmadinejad’s claims of fighting corruption will be called into question.  During both his presidential election campaigns, Ahmadinejad made fighting financial corruption in Iran his main pledge.

The way that Majlis conservatives have begun to severely criticise Ahmadinejad and his cabinet shows that despite eliminating reformists from power and putting them on trial, and despite quelling the opposition Green Movement, the Iranian government is still far from becoming a cohesive administration.

Omid Memarian is an Iranian journalist and blogger based in San Francisco.