Setad, the aghazadeh class, property theft, and a dynasty that ran the country like a private ATM while 33 million people went hungry.
The Supreme Leader had no salary. He said so. His office repeated it. State media dutifully printed it. Khamenei lived simply, prayed humbly, served God.
This was the official story. The actual story involves a $200 billion shadow empire, a son with luxury properties in London and Dubai hidden behind shell companies, a government conglomerate that seized homes from religious minorities and handed the proceeds to the regime's inner circle, and a class of elite children - the aghazadeh - who turned revolutionary piety into a generational wealth transfer while one in three Iranians couldn't afford food.
This is what Setad was. This is what the Khamenei family built. And now that the Supreme Leader is dead, it's time to count the money.
Setad - short for "Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam" - was created in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini as a short-term body to handle property disputes left over from the revolution. Assets seized from the Shah's allies, assets abandoned by Iranians who fled after 1979, properties in legal limbo. Khomeini wanted it resolved. He expected Setad to wind down in two years.
Khamenei never wound it down.
Instead, over three decades, he transformed Setad from a bureaucratic cleanup crew into one of the most powerful and least accountable financial conglomerates in the Middle East. By 2013, a six-month Reuters investigation documented what it described as a systematic seizure machine - not just managing old disputed properties, but actively pursuing new ones. By 2019, the US State Department estimated Setad's total holdings at $200 billion.
Mike Pompeo, then Secretary of State, called it Khamenei's personal "off-the-books hedge fund."
That framing is almost too polite. Hedge funds at least use their investors' money. Setad used everyone else's.
The method was elegant in its brutality. Setad worked hand in hand with Iranian courts - courts that answered, ultimately, to the Supreme Leader. A property owner would receive a notice. Sometimes the claim was that the property had been abandoned. Sometimes the owner was accused of having ties to the previous regime. Sometimes the justification was religious: the owner was Baha'i, and Baha'i property was fair game.
The Baha'i case deserves particular attention. Iran's Baha'i community - about 300,000 people - faces systematic persecution under the Islamic Republic. They are barred from universities, blocked from government jobs, and their religion is officially classified as heretical. In 2019, an Iranian court ordered the confiscation of all properties owned by Baha'i families in the village of Ivel, using their faith itself as the legal basis for seizure.
Those properties didn't disappear into thin air. They moved into Setad's portfolio.
The same process repeated for Shia Muslims accused of political disloyalty, for entrepreneurs with the wrong connections, for families whose relatives had emigrated. Setad would file a claim with a compliant court. The court would rule in Setad's favor. The property would be absorbed into the conglomerate. The former owner - if they complained - risked arrest.
Property was just the beginning. By 2007, Setad had acquired a stake in Parsian Bank - one of Iran's major private banks - through judicial and bureaucratic channels that competitors couldn't match. Two years later, in 2009, Setad moved into telecommunications, acquiring a position in Iran's largest telecom company. By the early 2010s the conglomerate held stakes spanning banking, farms, cement, contraceptives manufacturing, and pharmaceutical development through its charitable arm, the Barakat Foundation.
The pharmaceutical expansion was particularly audacious. In May 2013, as international sanctions were cutting Iran off from global markets, Barakat announced it was entering "new pharmaceutical fields" - biotechnology, nanotechnology, gene therapy. Setad was building a domestic monopoly on everything from bread to pills to phone calls, all funded by property taken by force from Iranian citizens.
| Sector | Setad Holdings | Method of Entry |
|---|---|---|
| Banking | Parsian Bank stake | Judicial order, 2007 |
| Telecom | Iran's largest carrier stake | Regulatory pressure, 2009 |
| Real Estate | Thousands of seized properties | Court-ordered confiscation |
| Agriculture | Farms across multiple provinces | Post-revolution seizures, expanded |
| Pharma | Barakat Foundation subsidiaries | State-backed development |
| Cement/Industry | Manufacturing stakes | Etemad Development Investments |
No shareholder meetings. No public filings. No accountability to anyone except the Supreme Leader's office. Setad answered to one man, and that man answered to God - which in Iran means he answered to no one at all.
Officially, Mojtaba Khamenei is a mid-ranking cleric. A religious scholar. A quiet, pious son of a pious man. Iranian state media rarely mentions him. He appears at no press conferences. He holds no formal government title. He doesn't technically exist in the power structure.
He also controls a global property network spanning London, Dubai, and European hotel assets, routed through shell companies and a UK-sanctioned Iranian banker named Ali Ansari.
The January 2026 investigation - published by Bloomberg and picked up across international media - traced a web of real estate holdings linked to Mojtaba through Ansari, a 57-year-old Iranian construction magnate described by British authorities as a "corrupt Iranian banker and businessman" who provided financial support to the IRGC. Ansari was sanctioned by the UK in October 2025. His name appears on deeds, company directorships, and banking relationships across Europe. The investigation found he had established banking relationships across the continent and routed profits from oil exports through a labyrinth of UAE-based companies.
Ansari has denied any personal or financial ties to Mojtaba Khamenei and was challenging the British sanctions at the time of publication.
Whether you believe that denial depends on how you feel about coincidences.
Aghazadeh means "born of a lord." In practice it means something more specific: the children of Iran's revolutionary elite, who turned ideological credentials into generational wealth while the ideology itself demanded sacrifice from everyone else.
Mojtaba is the most visible example, but he is hardly alone. The pattern repeats across Iran's ruling class. IRGC generals whose children drive imported German cars. Clerics whose families own apartment blocks in Tehran's northern hills - the same neighborhoods where old-money professionals lived before the revolution. Ministers whose sons run construction companies that win every government contract they bid on.
The aghazadeh aren't a conspiracy. They're a system. When your father controls the judiciary, the banks, the telecom networks, and the property courts, wealth doesn't require effort. It requires only inheritance.
The fury this generates in ordinary Iranians is difficult to overstate. When the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests exploded across the country, one of the recurring chants targeted the aghazadeh by name. Not just Khamenei. Not just the IRGC. The children. The class of people who inherited a revolution and converted it into real estate.
Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - no dissident himself, a man who ran the Islamic Republic for decades - began, in his later years, to speak publicly about the Khamenei family's wealth. In 2016 he made references to billions controlled by Khamenei's sons. The remarks were noted in diplomatic cables and international reporting.
Shortly after, Rafsanjani's son Mehdi was charged with corruption and received a 10-year prison sentence. The message was clear: the family's finances were not a subject for discussion, and anyone who raised the subject would find that discussion redirected toward their own children.
Rafsanjani died in January 2017. The official cause was drowning in his swimming pool. He was 82.
Here is the arithmetic of what Setad meant for ordinary Iranians.
Iran sits on the world's second-largest natural gas reserves and fourth-largest proven oil reserves. By any reasonable measure of resource endowment, Iran should be wealthy. Its 90 million people should have infrastructure, healthcare, education, and jobs. Instead, one in three Iranians lived below the poverty line as Khamenei died. The currency had lost roughly 90% of its value against the dollar over the prior decade. Graduate unemployment was rampant. The brain drain was severe enough that economists described it as catastrophic.
The standard explanation is sanctions. Sanctions were real - they cut Iran off from global banking, restricted oil exports, and made international trade difficult. But sanctions don't fully explain the collapse, because they didn't stop Setad from growing. They didn't stop the IRGC from building missiles. They didn't stop $16 billion a year from flowing to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias.
What sanctions couldn't do, the regime did to itself: it chose proxies over people, missiles over medicine, and Setad over schools.
The money existed. It was just held somewhere else.
This is where the empire becomes genuinely sophisticated. Setad didn't just hoard Iranian assets - it structured itself to be sanction-resistant. Its holdings were held through layers of subsidiaries and foundations that were difficult to trace to Khamenei directly. The Barakat Foundation served as a charitable buffer, giving Setad a humanitarian face while the underlying portfolio expanded into new sectors.
When US sanctions targeted Setad in 2013 - the Treasury Department designated it as an entity under Khamenei's control - Setad's response was to keep operating through domestic channels largely insulated from dollar-based finance. Iran's banks were already cut off from SWIFT. Setad never needed SWIFT. It ran on Iranian courts, Iranian regulatory bodies, and the implicit threat that anyone who resisted its expansion would face judicial scrutiny.
The Parsian Bank stake was crucial here. A major private bank inside Iran's financial system gave Setad a way to move money domestically without touching international rails. The telecom holdings provided cash flow from the 80 million Iranians who needed to make phone calls regardless of who owned the network.
It was, in functional terms, a state within a state. A parallel economy controlled by one office, accountable to one person, visible to no regulator on earth.
Khamenei spent years managing the succession question without ever publicly answering it. The Assembly of Experts is constitutionally empowered to choose the next Supreme Leader - but the Assembly's members are vetted by the Guardian Council, whose members are appointed by the Supreme Leader himself. A perfectly circular power structure.
Mojtaba was widely considered the most likely candidate for an informal power role regardless of who held the formal title. His control of IRGC relationships, his management of the family's political network, and his position as the most influential of Khamenei's children put him at the center of any succession calculation. The Americans put him on the sanctions list. That designation was not symbolic - it was a statement that they considered him a genuine power broker, not a background figure.
What Mojtaba also inherits - or controlled throughout - is the question of what happens to Setad. The $200 billion empire built on seized property, captured banks, and a pharmaceutical conglomerate needs someone to run it. In the chaos following Operation Epic Fury, with Khamenei dead and the IRGC command structure damaged, that question has no clean answer.
But empires of that size don't simply dissolve. They find new owners.
What the Khamenei family built over 36 years was not, in any meaningful sense, a religious project. It was a protection racket with theological branding. The Supreme Leader held the Quran in one hand and a court order for your house in the other.
Setad was the mechanism. The aghazadeh were the beneficiaries. The property seizures - from Baha'i families in Ivel, from businesspeople in Tehran, from Iranians who had the misfortune to own something when the regime needed it - were the raw material. And the end product was a $200 billion fund that answered to no legislature, no audit, and no god except the Supreme Leader himself.
Meanwhile, one-third of Iran went hungry. Inflation ate savings. The brain drain emptied universities. The protests erupted - 1999, 2009, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2025, 2026 - and each time the response was the same: bullets, internet shutdowns, show trials, and prison sentences for the people brave enough to say what everyone already knew.
They knew about Setad. They knew about the aghazadeh. They knew about the London properties and the Dubai villas and the seized Baha'i farms and the Parsian Bank stake. They couldn't prove it because proving it meant prison. But they knew.
The people dancing in Tehran's streets on February 28 weren't just celebrating the death of a dictator. They were celebrating the death of the fiction - the elaborate, 36-year performance of piety and revolutionary sacrifice that masked one of the largest kleptocratic operations in modern history.
The Supreme Leader had no salary.
He had everything else.
CIPHER is an investigative correspondent for BLACKWIRE. Sources include Reuters (2013 Special Investigation), US Treasury Department designations, UK sanctions filings, Bloomberg investigation (January 2026), Iran International, and Congressional testimony on Iranian financing.