Official Says Iran’s Government Doesn’t Know Exact Value Of Its Assets

In an interview with Khabar Online website in Tehran published on Sunday, the head of the Iranian Privatization Organization, Hossein Ghorbanzadeh, said that the government seeks to solve its budget deficit and liquidity issues through privatization of state properties and companies but cannot do so because it does not exactly know their value.

US sanctions since 2018 have drastically cut government revenues from oil exports and trade, leaving a higher-than 50 percent budget deficit.

He said the government has a portfolio of assets that includes physical assets such as real estate and financial assets such as shares of state-owned enterprises.

Ghorbanzadeh also proposed the establishment of an emergency taskforces to investigate the assets, adding that the government has opened a website to gather data from officials and entities.

He said the current estimates of the value of the assets are in a wide range from $260 to $670 billion in today’s exchange rates.

Earlier in December, the head of a government chamber of commerce, Gholam-Hossein Shafei said that the country had zero economic growth in the past decade, adding that the private sector in Iran has been dealt a bad hand by politically well-connected elites who took advantage of privatization to enrich themselves.