Guest post be Banafsheh Zand and Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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Before his pseudomysterious death in 2017, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Islamic Republic, and his status has been passed down to his children. Though marginalized since their father’s death, Mohsen Hashemi Rafsanjani has reentered the news cycle after giving an interview in which he offered a plan by which the Islamic Republic could survive US military attacks and “wait out” the Trump administration.

Offering what he presented as “common sense,” Rafsanjani argued that Iran should make some kind of arrangement with Donald Trump – whom he characterised as a “raging bull” – for the remaining two years of his presidency, help him out of the “swamp” he has put himself in, prevent him from doing more damage to Iran, and then, once Trump is gone and a “more reasonable person” comes to power in Washington, simply tear up the agreement. The argument is simple: sign now, survive now, lie now — and later declare that Iran accepted the agreement only under unjustified pressure and demand fresh negotiations. His justification was equally revealing Trump withdrew from an agreement, so Iran can do the same.

What Mohsen Hashemi stated was nothing more than the standard behaviour of the Rafsanjani family. Having always marketed themselves as the clever faction of the Islamic Republic, they’ve always presented themselves as the pragmatic, moderate, reasonable, and worldly “house” among the Khomeinist elite. In reality, they are entirely committed to the same goals of the entire Islamic Republic: maintenance of totalitarian control; establishing dominance over the rest of the Middle East and then; becoming a global power. Since Ali Akbar Hashemi was quite successful at manipulating administrations of both parties in Washington, and his son believes that his methods could triumph again, it is worthwhile to dwell on the story of the Rafsanjanis, both father and children.

ICYMI: Mohsen Hashemi Rafsanjani, son of late Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani saying the quiet part out loud here about the need for get a deal with Trump just to pass his remaining 2 years in office, then tearing it up after he departs. pic.twitter.com/HoG2y7sZsz

— Behnam Ben Taleblu بهنام بن طالب لو (@therealBehnamBT) June 2, 2026

A Major Leader within the System

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was speaker of the Islamic Majles (Parliament) from 1980 to 1989, President from 1989 to 1997, chairman of the Assembly of Experts from 2006 to 2011, chairman of the Expediency Council from 1989 until his death, and one of the key men who helped elevate Ali Khamenei to the supreme leadership after Khomeini’s death. Born to a family of wealthy pistachio farmers in 1934 in the village of Bahraman near the city of Rafsanjan in Kerman Province, Ali Akbar Hashemi’s original surname was Bahrami. He moved to Qom at a young age to study under Ruhollah Khomeini, and became an Islamic Revolutionary during the 1960s as a member of the Motalefeh (Islamic Coalition Party). Khomeini named Rafsanjani a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Council in 1979 immediately upon taking power, and Rafsanjani never ceased to a person of power from then on. In some ways, he did not differ from the rest of the ruling mullahs. For example, he once boasted that Israel could be annihilated with only one nuclear bomb. By his own admission, he thought about developing nuclear weapons during the 1980s. In a 1998 speech, he denied the Holocaust had occurred and claimed that Israelis were more evil than Hitler. When he became president in 1989, he ordered his intelligence chief, Ali Fallahian, to begin a widespread assassination campaign of dissidents living in Europe. He also continued Khomeini’s work of sponsoring terrorism and was wanted by the government of Argentina for ordering the 1994 AMIA bombing.

The Capitalist Mullah and Double-Dealings with the West

Khomeini never quite elaborated a specific Islamic economic system, and his followers varied on this subject from almost-Soviet-style socialists on the left to monopoly capitalists on the right. Rafsanjani posed himself as the leader of this latter group, which he dubbed Pragmatists. Though having no disagreement regarding the nature of the Islamic Republic or its foreign policy goals, Rafsanjani believed that Tehran could expand its power best by seemingly making deals with the West – betting on the fact that for reasons of short-term greed, large multinational corporations could be used as tools for persuading Western governments to appease Tehran. He had his first achievements in this field during the Iran-Contra scandal of 1985-86. With the knowledge and consent of Khomeini, but falsely claiming to be a “moderate” group opposed to the Ayatollah’s total dictatorship, Rafsanjani and his associates managed to obtain badly-needed American weapons for the war with Iraq from the Reagan administration in return for promising to get hostages held in Lebanon by their proxy group, Hezbollah, released.

In his book Nest of Spies, journalist Amir Taheri revealed how at one point, Rafsanjani travelled to the US using his birth name of Bahrami and his American interlocuters did not even realise who he was. No hostage was ever released despite many promises, and despite the scandal, Rafsanjani’s actions was perceived as a great success within elite circles. In a sense, his policies were made for his time. In 1989, Iran was in ruins after a decade of war and internal chaos, and foreign capital was needed if Iran were to rebuild. Rafsanjani obtained what he wanted – vast foreign loans poured in Europe along with contracts for all the major multinationals. Politically, European governments looked the other way to the killings of dissidents and instead began a “critical dialogue” with Iran in 1992. During those same years, with the help of oil companies, a pro-Tehran lobby began to be created in the USA.

Rafsanjani was hardly unique in using his status to enrich himself – almost every leading figure in Tehran became a billionaire – but he was the most open about it and he almost paraded his wealth. His business empire extended far beyond Iran to take in Romanian gold, hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign banks, a Canadian private road (Highway 407 in Ontario) and shopping center (Center Point Mall, Toronto), to assets in far-flung places such as Dubai and Venezuela. Forbes Magazine exposed some of his dealing in a 2003 article entitled “Millionaire Mullahs” and a partial list of his holdings in Iran was released by his rivals to Fars News in 2009.

Increasing Infighting and a Mysterious Death

Rafsanjani’s desire for more power could not be satiated. Into the 2000s, he was commonly rumoured to be proposing himself as a successor to Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader. Some in Khamenei’s entourage feared Rafsanjani was actually planning to oust Khamenei via a palace coup. However, the Islamic Republic had developed in a way rendering Rafsanjani’s “pragmatism” no longer quite as useful.

The emergence of the “reformist” camp in 1997 gathered together most of the adherents of a ‘softer” foreign policy, while the so-called “principlists” or “hardliners” led by Khamenei continued to push military means as the only method for advancing Tehran’s goals.

Rafsanjani tried to adjust his public reputation by speaking in support of the 2009 Green Movement (the reformist campaign led by former prime minister Mir Houssein Mousavi, whose defeat in the presidential election was widely believed to have been rigged) and his daughter Faezeh spent six months in prison for participating in the protests.

Most Iranians clearly saw through the posturing and did not see him as being truly sincere. Khamenei managed to remove Rafsanajani from some of his offices within the Khomeiniist bureaucracy, but with his enormous wealth, he remained immensely powerful. The 2013 election victory of Hassan Rouhani was said to have been partially engineered by him, as well as the 2016 Assembly of Experts election. He also began to say, in private conversations, that it had been a mistake to make Khamenei the Supreme Leader.

A lifetime of political intrigue came to an end, however, on January 8, 2017, when Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani died at age 82 from what was said to be a hard attack while he was swimming in his pool. Tehran gossip, which thrives on reporting the infighting and violent purges within the system which are never publicly disclosed, immediately began to speculate that Rafsanjani had been murdered by his “principlist” rivals. Khamenei himself gave grounds for this speculation when he failed to utter certain requisite prayer formulae at Rafsanjani’s funeral.

Later that year, his children revealed that an examination found that Rafsanjani was carrying ten time the amount of radioactivity normally carried by a human being. President Hassan Rouhani ordered an investigation into the death of his former mentor in January 2018. But, the investigating committee was led by Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Shamkhani, a Khamenei flunky, and its finds thus predictably found Rafsanjani to have died of natural causes. Rafsanjani’s daughter Faezeh would comment that year that it would require Miss Marple to solve the case of her father’s death. Meanwhile, opponents of Hassan Rouhani began threatening that the pool was waiting for him.

In succeeding years, more facts would be disclosed by his children. In 2019, his daughter Fatemeh told the newspaper Etemad that two unknown men had informed her that her father’s life was threatened a month before his death, due to his desire to succeed Khamenei. Over the next few years, she and her sister Faezeh would mention “several suspicious circumstances, including delays in getting him to the hospital, the lack of access to CCTV footage from the swimming pool and his office, the absence of a post-mortem examination despite their requests, a rushed burial, and the disappearance of highly confidential documents, including diaries and his last will and testament, from his office safe shortly after his death.”

Former Revolutionary Guards commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi would finally seem to confirm that Rafsanjani was assassinated when in October 2025 he posted on X that “I do not wish to die in bed or in a swimming pool.”

The Heirs

The post A Notorious Billionaire Family Reemerges from the Shadows: The Rafsanjanis Try to Return to the Spotlight appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.