Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber. Iran’s supreme leader appointed Mr. Mokhber as country’s acting president on May 20, 2024, after a helicopter crash killed President Ebrahim Raisi.
| Photo Credit: AP

Iran’s first Vice President Mohammad Mokhber was appointed as acting President of the Islamic Republic on May 20 after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in the country’s northwest.

Mr. Mokhber, 68, largely has been in the shadows compared to other politicians in Iran’s Shia theocracy. Raisi’s death under the constitution thrust Mr. Mokhber into public view. He is expected to serve as caretaker President for some 50 days before mandatory presidential elections in Iran.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made the announcement of Mr. Mokhber’s appointment in a condolence message he shared for Raisi’s death in the crash on May 19. The helicopter was found on May 20 in northwestern Iran.

Despite his low-key public profile, Mr. Mokhber has held prominent positions with in the country’s power structure, particularly in its bonyads, or charitable foundations. Those groups were fuelled by donations or assets seized after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, particularly those previously associated with Iran’s shah or those in his government.

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Mr. Mokhber oversaw a bonyad known in English as the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order, or EIKO, referring to the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The U.S. Treasury said the organization oversaw billions of dollars in assets as “a business juggernaut under the direct supervision of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that has a stake in nearly every sector of the Iranian economy, including energy, telecommunications, and financial services.”

“EIKO has systematically violated the rights of dissidents by confiscating land and property from opponents of the regime, including political opponents, religious minorities, and exiled Iranians,” the Treasury said in 2021 in sanctioning Mokhber. The European Union also had sanctioned Mokhber for a time with others over concerns then about Iran’s nuclear program.

As the head of EIKO, Mr. Mokhber oversaw an effort to make a COVID-19 vaccine during the height of the pandemic, pledging to make tens of millions of doses. Only a fraction of that ever made it to the public, without explanation.

Mr. Mokhber previously worked in banking and telecommunications. He also worked at the Mostazafan Foundation, another bonyad that’s a major conglomerate that manages the country’s mega-projects and businesses. While there, he found himself entangled in a bitter legal dispute between mobile phone service providers Turkcell and South Africa’s MTN over potentially entering the Iranian market.

MTN ended up entering Iran. A Turkcell filing alleged Mokhber sought MTN’s help in securing “certain defense equipment” in exchange for potentially working with it as opposed to Turkcell.

Mr. Mokhber used “improper influence up to and including negotiating with and on behalf of the Supreme Leader in MTN’s favor,” Turkcell later alleged in a legal filing. An MTN report later said there were no arms transfers, though it acknowledge Mokhber was a player in Iran’s decision to go with MTN.

Iranian media reports suggest Mr. Mokhber, who holds a doctorate in international law, was crucial in Iranian efforts to bypass Western sanctions on its oil industry.

Mr. Mokhber has been a member of Iran’s Expediency Council since 2022, which advises the supreme leader, as well as settles disputes between parliament and the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog that also oversees the country’s elections.

Mr. Mokhber was born Sept. 1, 1955, in Dezful in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan province to a clerical family. He served as an officer in the Revolutionary Guard’s medical corps during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, according to the pressure group United Against Nuclear Iran.

“Mokhber used the vast wealth accumulated by EIKO — at the expense of the Iranian people—to reward regime insiders like himself,” UANI said. “Managing the patronage network endeared him to the supreme leader, but at a cost.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei casts his vote during parliamentary elections in Tehran, Iran, on March 1, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Iran began voting on March 1 in its first parliamentary elections since the mass 2022 protests over its mandatory hijab laws after the death of Mahsa Amini, with questions looming over just how many people will turn out for the poll.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 84, will cast one of the first votes in an election that also will see new members elected to the country’s Assembly of Experts. The panel of clerics, who serve an eight-year term, is mandated to select a new supreme leader if Khamenei steps down or dies, giving their role increased importance with Khamenei’s age.

Also read: Explained | Mahsa Amini and the widespread protests in Iran

Some 15,000 candidates are vying for a seat in the 290-member parliament, formally known as the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Terms run for four years, and five seats are reserved for Iran’s religious minorities.

Under the law, the parliament has oversight over the executive branch, votes on treaties and handles other issues. In practice, absolute power in Iran rests with its supreme leader.

Hard-liners have controlled the parliament for the past two decades — with chants of “Death to America” often heard from the floor.

Under Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard general who supported a violent crackdown on Iranian university students in 1999, the legislature pushed forward a bill in 2020 that greatly curtailed Tehran’s cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

That followed then-President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal of America from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018 — an act that sparked years of tensions in the Middle East and saw Iran enrich enough uranium at record-breaking purity to have enough fuel for “several” nuclear weapons if it chose.

More recently, the parliament has focused on issues surrounding Iran’s mandatory head covering, or hijab, for women after the 2022 death of 22-year-old Amini in police custody, which sparked nationwide protests.

The protests quickly escalated into calls to overthrow Iran’s clerical rulers. A subsequent security crackdown killed over 500 people, with more than 22,000 detained.

Calls for an election boycott have spread in recent weeks, including from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, a women’s right activist, who called them a “sham.”

The boycott calls have put the government under renewed pressure — since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s theocracy has based its legitimacy in part on turnout in elections.

The state-owned polling center ISPA hadn’t put out election data prior to the vote until Thursday, something highly unusual as their figures typically get released much earlier. Its polling, based on a survey of 5,121 voting-age people, predicted a turnout of 23.5% in the capital, Tehran, and 38.5% nationally. It said the margin of error in the poll was 2%.