The Washington Post:

By Yeganeh Torbati

One of the most successful companies to emerge from Iran’s decade-old start-up boom is a firm offering online classified ads similar to Craigslist that counts nearly half the country’s population as users.

But when the company, Divar, decided it wanted to go public on the Tehran stock exchange, Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stepped in during the spring to block the move, objecting to the firm’s outspoken, independent-minded chairman, according to an internal letter he publicized last week.

The posting of the letter was remarkable in this secretive, authoritarian country. But behind the scenes, this kind of intervention by the IRGC in the Iranian economy has become commonplace, according to Iranian private-sector executives and experts on Iran’s economy and politics.

And while the IRGC is well known for influencing the economy through the major stakes the group has held at one time or another in construction, telecommunications, oil and other industries, the move to block Divar’s stock offering demonstrates how the Revolutionary Guard also wields economic power under the radar, even over companies it has no shares in. The IRGC is Iran’s most powerful security and intelligence organization, established shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution to preserve the country’s clerical rule.

The executive who had rankled the Revolutionary Guard — Divar’s founder, Hessam Armandehi — has a reputation for regularly criticizing government actions. And Divar has in recent years resisted government demands that it turn over private user data and pressure to sell company shares to government-connected conglomerates, according to public statements by company officials and interviews with people familiar with the company.

Late last month, Armandehi disclosed the IRGC’s veto of his plans to take the firm public by publishing the letter, sent June 10 by a security official to an official at the Tehran Securities Exchange, on his LinkedIn profile. “It is hereby brought to your attention that the Intelligence Organization of the Guards … has declared Mr. Hessam Mir Armandehi’s lack of qualification, and consequently, the company’s acceptance is contingent upon his absence,” read the letter, which said the IRGC order came April 27. It was unclear how he obtained the letter.

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