Iran’s Revolutionary Guards intervened this spring to block a leading tech firm’s stock market debut, The Washington Post on Wednesday, in a sign of the sprawling military organization's grip over the ailing economy.
The company, Divar, is one of the most prominent firms to emerge from Iran’s start-up sector in the past decade. Its CEO took the rare step of publishing online a letter indicating the Revolutionary Guards' disapproval of its listing under his leadership.
Offering online classified ads similar to Craigslist, Divar enables Iranians to buy and sell secondhand goods and find and rent homes.
It has about 38 million active users, or nearly half the country’s population, according to a 2023 report from a Swedish investment firm with indirect shares in the company.
But its efforts to go public on the Tehran Stock Exchange were halted after the Guards objected to the presence of Divar’s founder and CEO, Hessam Mir Armandehi.
Late last month, Armandehi published a copy of the internal order on LinkedIn. “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,” the June 10 letter read. According to the document, the order had been issued on April 27.
Divar is reportedly highly profitable, according to four people familiar with the company who spoke to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity. A consortium of foreign investors, including Europeans, holds 15 percent of the shares of its parent company, according to its website. The consortium and the Swedish firm declined to comment.
The post was seen as a rare act of defiance in what The Washington Post called a secretive, authoritarian system.
Dozens of Iranian executives shared Armandehi’s post and wrote messages of support. “I wish we had a good and responsible government that appreciated great and capable entrepreneurs and start-ups,” one wrote. Another added, “Exactly for this reason it is impossible to grow in Iran!!”
Divar has previously clashed with security institutions. The company has refused to turn over private user data and resisted pressure to sell shares to entities linked to the state.
One person familiar with the company said Divar was also pressured to sell to a firm partly owned by a conglomerate close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who holds ultimate authority over the Guards.
In one past case, Armandehi’s cousin and fellow executive Ashkan Armandehi was briefly detained after refusing to hand over user data.
He later told Iranian media the company would not comply with blanket requests. “Providing information about ads and users without a court order is illegal,” he said.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are widely known to hold major shares in oil, telecom, and construction. But the Divar case has exposed the Guards’ expanding informal control over digital companies they do not legally own, the article said.
“If a founder doesn’t have the right to stay in their own company, no investor will confidently invest in the digital economy,” Iran’s Deputy ICT Minister Ehsan Chitsaz wrote on X. “The stock market is a tool for corporate governance and transparency, not a tool for the arbitrary elimination of individuals or managerial coercion.”
The pressure Armandehi described has further deepened the private sector’s challenges by eroding fair competition and undermining Iran’s efforts to attract foreign capital, experts told The Washington Post.
“This leads to lower investment, of course, and it leads to capital flight not only from investors in Divar but also in many other digital companies, many other companies that are private,” said Mahdi Ghodsi, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “If they continue these kinds of policies, they are helping the collapse of the Islamic Republic.”
Despite the threats, Armandehi said he is staying. “Even now with all these pressures, I’ve neither lost hope nor have any plans for emigrating or leaving Divar,” he wrote.
