TEHRAN -- Supreme Audit Court Director Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli has announced that the SAC monitors the Oil Ministry's deposits into the state treasury on a monthly basis.
Speaking at a press conference in Tehran on Monday, he pledged that there would not be a repetition of incidents like the case of the $1 billion in oil revenues that the Oil Ministry failed to deposit into the state treasury.
In September, the Supreme Audit Court reported that the Oil Ministry failed to deposit $1.058 billion in surplus oil revenues for Iranian calendar year 1387 (March 2008- March 2009) into the state treasury.
Asked why the Supreme Audit Court reported the case of the $1 billion as if the money had gone missing, Rahmani Fazli said he was not in charge of the SAC at that time.
He stated that the case was described in a report presented to the Majlis, and the report neither called the issue a case of fraud nor said the money had gone missing, but said in technical terms there was a deficit in the account.
And in the 2009 presidential election campaign, the case was used by some people who were uninformed and certain people who were biased, he added.
Asked whether Transparency International's recent report on administrative corruption in Iran corresponds to the findings of the Supreme Audit Court, Rahmani Fazli said the TI report is based on certain criteria that the SAC does not recognize.
However, he said this does not mean that Iran rejects the report, and the country should make efforts to fulfill their criteria.
Transparency International is an international non-governmental organization fighting corruption and trying to raise public awareness of it. Every year it publishes its Corruption Perceptions Index, a comparative listing of corruption worldwide.
Rahmani Fazli said that in a recent meeting, he told one of Transparency International's senior officials that TI does not have an office in Iran and thus its reports about the country are not based on concrete evidence
© Tehran Times 2009
