It all began in Charsoo, a centrally located tech mall in Tehran, where shop owners launched a strike June 24 to protest the uncertainty caused by foreign exchange fluctuations, which they said had strongly impacted business.
The shutdown prompted the minister of information and communications technology to visit the market in person for a firsthand look at the situation. What happened afterward was like a bombshell. In a chain of tweets, the young minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, disclosed a list of leading cellphone importers who had been granted whopping foreign currency at the official “unified” rate of 42,000 rials per dollar, but had sold the products for prices calculated on the black market rate of around 79,000 rials per greenback.