A new controversy over the intermediaries selling Iranian oil is reviving a larger debate inside Iran over corruption, political connections and the enormous private fortunes created around the country’s sanctions economy. Hamshahri, a major Tehran newspaper, has published the names of four individuals - Ali Bayandarian, Rouhollah Razavi, Mohammad-Hadi Momenin and Hossein Shamkhani - while reporting on questions raised in parliament about how tens of millions of barrels of Iranian oil have been allocated to private intermediaries.
These intermediaries, often described in Iran as “trustees,” have become essential to the country’s oil trade under sanctions. Because Iran cannot freely use conventional banking, shipping and insurance networks, it relies on traders, foreign companies, ships and indirect financial channels to sell oil and return the proceeds.
But the latest parliamentary scrutiny is exposing the other side of that system: who selects these intermediaries, how much oil they receive, what guarantees they provide and whether proximity to political power influences who is intimately involved in the trade of Iran’s most valuable national resources.
Lawmaker Valiollah Bayati has demanded documentation explaining how the four traders were selected, their financial capacity and previous performance, the prices and discounts they received and the guarantees obtained for returning oil revenues. He has also asked whether intermediaries with outstanding debts were nevertheless given additional cargoes and whether other qualified companies had a genuine opportunity to compete for the business.
The quantities involved make those questions difficult to dismiss. Bayati has sought an accounting of roughly 72 million barrels of crude oil associated with the period he is examining. Another lawmaker, Hossein Samsami, has separately alleged that more than 86 million barrels were provided on credit to one individual without sufficient guarantees, with only part of the oil ultimately reaching the final buyer.
These parliamentary claims do not establish that the four people named by Hamshahri committed crimes, nor has the Oil Ministry publicly connected each of the disputed quantities to particular individuals. But they raise a broader question about how officials entrusted potentially billions of dollars in public assets to a relatively small and largely opaque group of private actors.
The most politically sensitive name is Hossein Shamkhani, whose father, Ali Shamkhani, spent decades at the highest levels of Iran’s political and security establishment before he was killed in the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes of the current war on February 28, 2026. Ali Shamkhani served as defense minister and for nearly a decade as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. After being seriously wounded during the June 2025 war, he later became secretary of Iran’s Defense Council.
Hossein, meanwhile, built an extensive international shipping and commodities business involved in the trade of Iranian and Russian petroleum. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Hossein Shamkhani and a network of companies and vessels in 2025, alleging that he had benefited from his father’s political influence and that vessels associated with his network received preferential treatment at Iranian ports. Shamkhani has denied that his father was involved in his business activities. Washington imposed further sanctions on companies and vessels it linked to his network in 2026, after Ali Shamkhani’s death.
Those are U.S. government allegations, not findings by an Iranian court. But the fact that an Iranian parliamentarian is now asking how Hossein Shamkhani and the other traders were selected gives the issue greater domestic significance.
The question is no longer simply how Iran circumvents U.S. sanctions – it is also who inside Iran gains access to the lucrative business created by circumventing them. Iran has confronted this problem before.
The most important precedent is Babak Zanjani, who emerged as a crucial oil and financial intermediary when sanctions tightened during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Zanjani operated a sprawling international network of companies and financial institutions capable of selling Iranian oil and moving money when conventional banking channels were increasingly unavailable. Iranian authorities later accused him of failing to return billions of dollars in oil revenues. He was arrested in 2013 and eventually sentenced to death for corruption. However,
After authorities said assets connected to Zanjani had been recovered, his death sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison in 2024. He subsequently was released from prison in April 2025 and has returned to highly visible business activity, including major transportation and investment projects.
Zanjani’s return makes the current controversy particularly striking. More than a decade after Iran experienced one of its largest corruption cases involving a sanctions intermediary, the country remains dependent on essentially the same model: private actors trusted with enormous quantities of oil because they possess the networks necessary to operate outside the conventional international financial system.
That does not mean the four individuals named by Hamshahri have followed the practices of Zanjani. No evidence currently establishes comparable wrongdoing under Iran’s legal system. The parallel is instead about the system that produces such powerful intermediaries.
Sanctions push various economic actors into secrecy to mitigate risk. Ownership structures may be obscured, payments routed through third countries and informal financial networks, and oil transported through companies and vessels designed to reduce exposure to U.S. enforcement. These mechanisms have allowed Iran to continue exporting oil despite extensive sanctions. But the same secrecy that protects transactions from foreign enforcement also makes domestic oversight considerably more difficult.
This creates opportunities for corruption and political patronage. Traders capable of providing foreign companies, ships, bank accounts, currency networks and access to buyers become extremely valuable to the government. But the government must decide whom to trust with those assets, and those decisions are largely hidden from public scrutiny.
This is why the current parliamentary inquiry is ultimately about more than four businessmen. If tens of millions of barrels were handed to intermediaries, government officials had to authorize those transactions. Someone determined who qualified as a trustee, approved the prices and discounts, accepted the guarantees and decided whether additional oil could be provided when previous obligations remained unresolved.
That moves the corruption question up the chain of authority. Who recommended the traders? What criteria were used? Were politically connected individuals treated differently from competitors? Who approved transactions involving insufficient guarantees? And if oil revenues were not returned, were the officials who authorized those transactions ever held responsible?
These questions have implications far beyond Tehran’s internal political disputes. Oil remains one of Iran’s most important sources of foreign currency. Excessive discounts, unpaid debts, commissions and corruption ultimately reduce resources available to a country already struggling with inflation, currency depreciation and the economic consequences of sanctions and war.
For ordinary Iranians, the sanctions economy can therefore impose costs from two directions. Sanctions themselves restrict trade, investment and access to financial markets. But they also push increasingly valuable economic activity into opaque networks where oversight is weaker and individuals with privileged access can accumulate extraordinary wealth.
That does not absolve Iranian officials of responsibility. Sanctions did not force officials to favor politically-connected individuals, accept inadequate guarantees or tolerate corruption where it occurred. Those are domestic decisions for which Iranian institutions remain responsible.
But sanctions have helped create an economic environment in which secrecy is not an exception but a requirement — and where the line separating steps to mitigate sanctions risk, political patronage and private enrichment can become extraordinarily difficult for the public to see.
This is what makes the publication of the four names significant. The stakes are not just whether the individualized actors are corrupt, but whether Iran replicated the Zanjani model and incorporated it as an intrinsic part of its vital oil trade. More than a decade after Zanjani’s arrest, the Iranian public still knows remarkably little about who receives the country’s oil, who selects the trustees, how much they earn, what guarantees they provide and who is accountable when billions of dollars in public assets are placed at risk.
The parliamentary inquiry could begin answering those questions. But doing so would require looking beyond the traders themselves to the officials and institutions that gave them access to Iran’s oil in the first place.