Iran Today

The Invisible Jetties

by Iran Prism 8 min read

The Fixer

Babak Zanjani was once Iran’s most notorious criminal. A businessman who had brokered billions of dollars in illicit oil sales, he was convicted of embezzlement in 2016 and sentenced to death.1 The charges were specific: $2.8 billion in oil revenues that were supposed to reach the Iranian treasury and never did.

For years, Zanjani sat on death row while his case wound through appeals. Then, in 2025, he was quietly released. Not pardoned — released. To manage the IRGC’s sanctions-busting operations.

The death sentence had been the price of getting caught. Freedom was the price of being needed.

Zanjani’s rehabilitation tells you everything about the IRGC’s relationship to the law. The standard framing calls this “corruption” — as though the IRGC is a legitimate institution with a criminal side hustle. The mechanism is definitional misdirection: label systemic looting as individual corruption, and the audience looks for bad apples instead of examining the tree. The IRGC is the system, and that system runs on what the rest of the world calls crime: smuggling, money laundering, sanctions evasion, kleptocracy. The “Resistance Economy” that Khamenei preaches from his bunker in Lavizan is a euphemism for the most sophisticated criminal enterprise in the Middle East.

The Ghost Fleet

The primary engine of the IRGC’s financial autonomy is oil — sold in defiance of international sanctions through a logistics network that reads like a spy novel but operates at industrial scale.

Iran maintains a ghost fleet of tankers with disabled transponders — Automatic Identification Systems switched off so the vessels vanish from commercial tracking databases. The tankers are frequently reflagged under the registry of countries with minimal oversight, renamed to break the trail, and deployed in ship-to-ship transfers at sea — crude oil pumped from one vessel to another far from port authority observation.

The primary buyers are small, independent “teapot” refineries in China — facilities that operate outside the formal Chinese banking system and process Iranian crude without the regulatory scrutiny that major Chinese state-owned refineries would face. Revenue from these sales is held in accounts across China, the UAE, and Turkey. It is never repatriated to Iran. It doesn’t need to be. The money is spent where it sits — routed through exchange houses and shell companies to pay for weapons components, proxy operations, and dual-use technology, all without touching an Iranian bank.

In October 2025, the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network published a landmark trend analysis: approximately $9 billion in illicit Iranian financial activity had moved through the US financial system via correspondent accounts in a single year.2 Nine billion dollars — flowing through the financial infrastructure of the nation leading the sanctions campaign against Iran.

The Laundry

The exchange houses are the nervous system of this financial architecture.

Nasser Zarrin Ghalam and Partners Company and Berelian Exchange, both designated by the US Treasury in June 2025, operated out of Tehran with branches in Dubai and Istanbul. Their function was not currency exchange in any conventional sense. They served as clearinghouses: issuing instructions to foreign accounts holding oil revenue, directing payments to proxy groups or weapons suppliers without the funds ever entering Iran’s formal banking system.

The routing was designed for maximum obfuscation. A missile component destined for Hezbollah might be purchased like this: oil sold by a ghost tanker to a Shandong teapot refinery generates revenue held in a Chinese account. A Tehran exchange house instructs that account to pay a shell company in Hong Kong. The shell company — perhaps Magical Eagle Limited, or Golden Pen General Trading, or Gutown Trade Limited — procures the component from a dual-use technology supplier, posing as an electronics or auto parts dealer. The component ships to Iran via intermediary ports. At no point does money flow through an Iranian bank. At no point does the transaction appear on any Iranian ledger.

And in the digital realm, the IRGC found an even less traceable channel. Zedcex and Zedxion, cryptocurrency exchanges exposed in 2026, processed billions of dollars in digital currency for the Quds Force. Cryptocurrency offered what the ghost fleet and exchange houses could not: near-instantaneous transfers with minimal regulatory visibility, across borders, without the need for correspondent banking relationships or physical commodity transfers.

The system’s strategic purpose extended beyond enrichment. It made the IRGC financially autonomous — independent of the official Iranian state budget. When the rial collapsed, the Quds Force’s dollar-denominated offshore accounts were unaffected. When domestic tax revenue cratered, the Guard’s smuggling income continued. The civilian economy could burn and the machine would keep running — at least for a time.

The Tapes

If the ghost fleet represents the IRGC’s outward-facing criminal economy, the Yas Holding scandal revealed the inward-facing version — looting the Iranian state itself to fund the proxy wars that justified the IRGC’s existence.

Leaked audio recordings from 2022, suppressed for years by the IRGC-IO, surfaced fully during the 2026 crisis. The tapes implicated two of the most powerful men in the Islamic Republic: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — former IRGC commander, former Tehran mayor, then Speaker of Parliament — and Qasem Soleimani himself, the architect of Iran’s proxy empire, killed by a US drone in 2020.

The scheme was straightforward in its audacity. Approximately $3 billion was siphoned from the Tehran Municipality’s budget and redirected to fund Quds Force operations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.3 The IRGC-IO under Hossein Taeb — the same intelligence organization tasked with protecting the state from internal threats — actively covered up the embezzlement.

The logic was circular: the IRGC needed money for proxy wars. It took the money from the state. The proxy wars were then cited as the security threat justifying the IRGC’s control of the state. The corruption was not a side effect of the system. It was the engine.

The Heist

The Yas Holding scandal involved billions. The Ayandeh Bank heist dwarfed it.

In late 2025, regime insiders looted 10 quadrillion rials from Ayandeh Bank — roughly $20 billion at official exchange rates. The scale was so vast that even state-controlled media could not suppress it entirely. The regime’s own outlets admitted what no Iranian needed to be told: this single act of kleptocracy had made every Iranian family 7% poorer.4

Imagine checking your bank account and discovering that your government had just made your family’s savings worth 7% less — not through inflation or policy failure, but through straightforward theft. Now imagine that the thieves are the same people who run your military, your courts, and your phone company. Who do you call?

The Empty Sofreh

The sofreh — the tablecloth spread on the floor where an Iranian family shares a meal — became the uprising’s most powerful symbol. As protein was eliminated from diets and families calculated whether they could afford bread, the phrase “empty sofreh” condensed an entire nation’s rage into two words.

The contrast with the ruling class was obscene:

  • The Aghazadeh — children of the clerical and military elite — drove Porsches through Tehran, vacationed on European yachts, posted their lifestyles on “Rich Kids of Tehran” Instagram accounts
  • The “Good Genes” scandal: a prominent reformist’s son attributed his success to superior genetics, confirming the public belief that the revolutionary elite viewed itself as a hereditary aristocracy
  • Khamenei preached the “Economy of Resistance” and simple food from a hardened bunker in Lavizan
  • Tasnim News Agency calculated that at average urban income, a Tehran household would need to save for 177 years to purchase a 100-square-meter apartment

When a father cannot buy bread, he does not care about the Axis of Resistance. The slogan that erupted from this despair — “No to Gaza, No to Lebanon, My Life for Iran” — was not anti-Palestinian sentiment. It was the accounting statement of a population that had been bankrupted to fund an empire it never asked for.

The Ledger

The numbers tell a story of a nation consumed by its own guardians.

The Collapse in Numbers

The rial had already breached 1.4 million to the dollar — a currency that traded at 70 to the dollar in 1979, now worth less than 0.005% of its revolutionary-era value. Food inflation exceeded 70%. Bread and cereal prices had doubled. The government’s budget deficit hit 60%, with revenue collection collapsing to 40% of planned levels. And against this backdrop of national impoverishment, $20 billion vanished into the hands of connected insiders.

Every zero added to the exchange rate represents a year of IRGC economic predation — no-bid contracts crowding out private enterprise, Bonyads operating as tax-exempt monopolies, invisible jetties importing goods duty-free and undercutting domestic producers.

The GAMAAN survey of 2025 found that approximately 80% of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic. Only 32% identify as Shia Muslim — in a state whose entire legitimacy rests on Shia theological authority.5 Fewer than 15% support the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih — the theological innovation that gives the IRGC its constitutional mandate. The machine persists not because anyone believes in it but because it controls the guns, the money, and the communications infrastructure.

This is the final irony of the invisible jetties: the IRGC built a criminal economy specifically to insulate itself from the consequences of its own governance. The ghost fleet, the exchange houses, the shell companies, the cryptocurrency channels — all designed to ensure that the Guard’s financial lifeline survives the collapse of the nation it governs. The civilian economy can disintegrate. The population can starve. The rial can become confetti.

The machine runs on different fuel.

But in December 2025, something changed. The empty sofreh proved more powerful than the ghost fleet. The bazaaris shut their shops. The steelworkers struck. The students walked out. And in 400 cities across all 31 provinces, the people whose money had been stolen, whose economy had been hollowed out, whose children had been impoverished to fund wars in countries they’d never visited, stepped into the streets and chanted the six words that the invisible jetties, for all their sophistication, cannot launder: My life for Iran.

This article is part of Inside the Machine. For the full institutional anatomy of the IRGC, see The Praetorian Leviathan. For the rise and collapse of Iran’s proxy empire, see The Ring of Fire.

Footnotes

  1. Crystal Intelligence, “Iran Case Shows Why List-Based Sanctions Screening Fails,” Investigation Report, accessed February 2026 ↩

  2. US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Trend Analysis on Illicit Iranian Financial Activity, October 2025 ↩

  3. IranWire, “Leaked Recording Reveals IRGC Commanders’ Squabbles Over Embezzled Cash from Tehran,” accessed February 2026 ↩

  4. US Treasury Department, “Treasury Sanctions Iranian Regime Officials for Violent Repression and Corruption,” Press Release SB0375, accessed February 2026 ↩

  5. GAMAAN (Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran), Religious Beliefs and Attitudes Survey, 2025 ↩