“He has to be constantly watched as he may commit some misconduct in any position he holds,” veteran conservative figure and current parliamentarian Mostafa Mir-Salim once said about Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, one of the most powerful politicians within the Islamic Republic’s ruling elites.
Earlier this month, Mir-Salim was back to haunt Ghalibaf, providing Iran’s judiciary with evidence implicating the parliament speaker in a massive bribery scheme that had been debated in 2017. Mir-Salim claimed that Ghalibaf had paid 650 billion Iranian rials (over $17 million if calculated on the market exchange rate of the period in question) to some lawmakers to drop an investigation into a separate multimillion-dollar property fraud case rooted in Ghalibaf’s 12-year tenure as the mayor of Tehran.