A Supplement to a Memoir of Hashemi Rafsanjani

Mr. Majid Ansari, [Chairman of the Integration and Budget Committee], said that today in the Parliament’s Budget Committee, there was a severe clash between Mr. [Akbar] Elami, [Representative of Tabriz], and Mr. [Rajabali] Mazrouei, [Representative of Isfahan], both of whom are from the hardline left, and the atmosphere of the Parliament has deteriorated due to these clashes.  

*Source: Shargh Newspaper, Thursday, February 1, 2024

Akbar Elami

First. The reason that the late Hashemi Rafsanjani referred to me in his memoirs as one of the "hardline leftists" may be due to the following reasons:  

1. My unreserved criticisms, notes, and articles against his performance and the policies of his government from 1996 to 2008, including a series of articles titled "On the Pretext of Inviting Investors" that I published in Salam newspaper, and my response to his reaction during Friday prayers in Tehran to these articles, published in the same newspaper under the title "Mr. President! Which Infamy and Unfairness!?";  

2. An interview I conducted titled "From Rafsanjan's Bahraman to Tabriz, Azerbaijan" with one of the weekly magazines of Azerbaijan in 1999, which had considerable repercussions;  

3. Speeches I delivered in Parliament criticizing his interventionist performance during his presidency of the Expediency Discernment Council;  

4. The pursuit of accusations regarding the receipt of a $150 million bribe from the Norwegian company Statoil attributed to Mehdi Hashemi in the Sixth Parliament;  

5. His conservative spirit, which typically led him to strike one nail and then another, thus inevitably perceiving the positions of people like me as extreme.

Second. The clash and argument mentioned in the memoirs of the late Hashemi have previously been briefly explained in the PDF published on October 8, 2016, on page 32 in my earlier channel, and incidentally, this conflict of mine with Mr. Majid Ansari, then representative of Kerman and Chairman of that year's Sixth Parliament's Integration Committee, and Mr. Mazrouei, representative of Isfahan and Vice Chairman of the Integration Committee, occurred in defense of the interests of Azerbaijan.

The story goes as follows: according to the internal regulations of Parliament, voting on the proposals raised in the Integration Committee must be conducted publicly. However, when it came time to present my proposals for Azerbaijan, these two, fearing that if the voting were public, the committee members would vote in favor of my three proposals benefiting Azerbaijan—including allocating a budget line for creating a pumping station for Iran's water rights from the Aras River for irrigating the Golfaraj, Yanakat, and Harzandat plains in the 2001 budget—together opposed and obstructed it, and in further acts of obstruction, they unilaterally announced that from now on, voting would be conducted in a non-public manner!!

My dispute with these two began here, but fortunately, with the support of the majority of the committee members for me, the voting was conducted publicly, and my proposed projects were approved. However, after the approval of my proposals, they unilaterally conducted the votes in a non-public manner, which led to Mr. Allahyari, representative of Kermanshah, also clashing with them, and since he was ignored, he left the committee in protest.