Iran’s top court confirms death sentence for tycoon

Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty against Iranian businessman Babak Zanjani for corruption, the judiciary said on Saturday, a sentence critics say will mask the identity of senior officials who supported him, according to Iran’s official IRNA news agency.
The Saturday report says Zanjani was sentenced to death over a variety of charges including money laundering and disrupting the country’s economy.
Zanjani was arrested in 2013 as part of a crackdown on alleged corruption during the rule of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iran’s Oil Ministry says Zanjani owes more than 2 billion euros ($2.25 billion) for oil sales he made on behalf of Ahmadinejad’s government.
Zanjani is one of Iran’s wealthiest businessmen, with a fortune worth an estimated $14 billion. He was arrested shortly after the election of President Hassan Rouhani.
By his own account, Zanjani had for years helped circumvent sanctions by arranging billions of dollars of oil deals through a network of companies stretching from Turkey to Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. Critics of the sentence, including Rouhani, said Zanjani’s execution might make it impossible to recover the funds and uncover the identity of officials who supported him.
Judiciary deputy head Gholamreza Ansari, quoted by the body’s official news website Mizan, said the court affirmed the death sentence against Zanjani, while death sentences against two co-defendants were revoked.

Kenyan envoy summoned
In another development, the country’s Foreign Ministry has summoned the Kenyan ambassador over the detention of two Iranian citizens in Kenya.
The Saturday report by the official IRNA news agency quotes Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi as asking Kenya to “seriously look into the issue.”
Sayed Nasrollah Ebrahimi and Abdolhosein Gholi Safaee were arrested Tuesday in Nairobi in an Iranian diplomatic car. The two lawyers were returning from a visit to a prison. They had been offering legal advice to a pair of Iranian citizens who have been sentenced to 15 years in jail on terrorism charges.
Kenyan officials have not commented on why they were detained. 

Source: Arab News