President Masoud Pezeshkian held a meeting with Iranian-born Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi during his trip to New York in September for the UN General Assembly, reform-leaning Tehran-based magazine Agahi-e No reported on Tuesday.
Neither party had publicized their alleged meeting at the time and it was not clear what the relative moderate president and the head of the successful worldwide ride-hailing app discussed.
Pezeshkian spoke with Khosrowshahi in Persian, the report said, which the executive still remembered despite leaving Iran at age 9.
It added that the meeting was part of Pezeshkian’s wider efforts to engage with prominent Iranians abroad and its plan to encourage expatriates to return to Iran.
The magazine's editor Mohammed Ghouchani is considered close to the president's advisors and well informed about his activities.
Uber did not immediately respond to an Iran International request for comment.
In early June before US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Trump had joked about Khosrowshahi being put in charge of nuclear negotiations with Iran.
“We’ll have Dara get up and negotiate,” Trump said speaking alongside Khosrowshahi at an event with business leaders at the White House.
In addition to meeting with Khosrowshahi, the publication said Pezeshkian also interacted with several high-profile diaspora figures during the trip.
These included Abdolkarim Soroush, a philosopher and religious intellectual with visiting posts at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Maryland, and Mohsen Kadivar, a reformist theologian, Islamic scholar and ex-cleric who is a research professor at Duke University.
In July, Pezeshkian called for the return of Iranians living abroad and urged coordination between the judiciary and intelligence services to ease concerns, despite past detentions of returnees.
“We must create a framework for Iranians abroad to return comfortably and without fear, and this requires coordination with the judiciary and the Ministry of Intelligence,” Pezeshkian said at a meeting at the foreign ministry.
Yet the president's invitation came against a record that has left many Iranian expatriates wary. In recent years, dual and foreign-based nationals returning to Iran have faced arrests, lengthy interrogations, and prison sentences.
Khosrowshahi moved to America after his family fled Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution in the late 1978.
In May, Khosrowshahi spoke at a livestreamed event organized by the Washington-based National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), where the group unveiled its “Iran Prosperity Project” (IPP), a diaspora-led initiative that outlines economic and political plans for a future Iran post–Islamic Republic.
