Iran International
Two years ago the editor of Iran's most hardline newspaper said management of the country's biggest online retailer would "fortunately" pass to those who serve the state. It is now chaired by a former spokesman for the supreme leader's business empire.
Hojjat Niki-Maleki identifies himself on LinkedIn as chairman of Digikala Group, having joined the board as a representative of Harakat Aval, the investment arm of the mobile operator MCI. An official company filing lists him as a board member without specifying the chairmanship.
The change dates to June 10 but became public only when the formal notice was published this week, according to the Iranian technology outlet Digiato.
Niki-Maleki previously headed communications for the Execution of Imam Khomeini's Order, commonly known as Setad, a conglomerate built largely on property confiscated after the 1979 revolution, controlled by the office of the supreme leader and under US sanctions. He also spent more than four years on MCI's board.
His earlier work was in hardline media. He ran Afsaran, an online platform that promoted anti-Western messaging and the authorities' concept of a cultural "soft war."
His social media history also shows an affinity with the military establishment: in January 2020 he posted a photograph of himself seated beside Qasem Soleimani, then commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, on an aircraft.
"I told him I was the son of a martyr, and his respect for me doubled," he wrote, describing Soleimani embracing him at an airport. "The sweet taste of my conversation with Haj Qasem is still with me."
Hojjat’s father, Hossein Niki-Maleki, was a member of the security team aboard Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the United States in 1988.
Boycott calls
The appointment prompted calls on Persian-language social media to stop shopping at Digikala, with critics pointing to his Setad connection, his politics and his role promoting Iran's domestic Covid-19 vaccine.
"Do not buy from Digikala. This is something you can do," one user wrote on X, arguing that purchases would ultimately help finance Revolutionary Guards missiles and drones.
Another framed the appointment as part of a wider expansion of state-linked influence over the company.
Much of the criticism returned to the vaccine. Niki-Maleki worked for Setad when its pharmaceutical arm developed CovIran Barekat, the domestically produced Covid-19 vaccine that authorities promoted during the pandemic, and he repeatedly used his own accounts to publicize its production and effectiveness.
That program became politically charged after the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei barred imports of American and British vaccines in January 2021. Critics argued that relying on domestic production delayed access to sufficient doses while Iran struggled to vaccinate its population, and some hold the officials who promoted it responsible for deaths that followed, a charge they have never accepted.
"He used to come here every day two years ago and hashtag that there would soon be good news and we would make a coronavirus vaccine," one user wrote.
About 150,000 people died from the pandemic across Iran, one of the heaviest official tolls in the region. Turkey, with a population of similar size, recorded roughly 100,000. Saudi Arabia reported fewer than 10,000 and the United Arab Emirates around 2,400. What each of those countries did have was early access to Western vaccines, the ones Iran's Supreme Leader had ruled out.
A pattern, not an appointment
The reaction reflects something larger than one board seat: a sequence of events that has moved Iran's most prominent private technology company steadily closer to the state.
Digikala was founded in 2006 by the brothers Hamid and Saeid Mohammadi and grew into the country's dominant online marketplace, the most recognizable business to emerge from Iran's private technology sector.
The pressure began in the summer of 2023, when police sealed its offices after photographs circulated of female employees without compulsory hijab.
In February 2024, the judiciary filed charges over products it said insulted Islamic sanctities, after users circulated images of mugs sold on the site bearing the name Fatemeh Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad. The company's chief executive, Masoud Tabatabai, was arrested on the order of the security prosecutor's office and released hours later pending further appearances. Pro-government vigilantes painted threatening messages on the company's building.
That same month, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of Kayhan and Khamenei's representative at the newspaper, said management of digital companies such as Digikala and the ride-hailing platform Snapp would "fortunately" be transferred to those "who serve the state."
Negotiations over a stake in Digikala also began in that period. They concluded this spring, when Harakat Aval, MCI's venture capital arm, bought 40 percent of Digikala Group in cash, taking over the holding of the venture firm Sarava Pars along with parts of other shareholdings.
The agreed valuation was 300 trillion rials, about $146 million at current market rates, in what the company called the largest investment in the history of Iran's digital economy.
Digikala said the founders would retain 22 percent and two of five board seats, along with executive management, business strategy and the selection of senior managers, and that no single shareholder would control the company.
MCI's own ownership is the point critics return to. Iran's largest mobile operator is a subsidiary of the Telecommunication Company of Iran, privatized in 2009 in a sale to a consortium widely reported to be linked to the Revolutionary Guards.
Niki-Maleki's appointment points to a wider shift in Iran's digital economy: the steady expansion of state-linked institutions into businesses built as private enterprises – which is also why a prediction made in a hardline newspaper in 2024 reads today less like a threat than a schedule.
For nearly half a century the Islamic Republic has reproduced the image of its leaders everywhere: on the walls of schools and government offices, in theatres, cinemas and concert halls, behind officials at podiums, on television screens. Visibility was not vanity. In a system built on the authority of one man, the leader had to be seen for the state to demonstrate that it existed.
Before the war with the United States and Israel, that was the rule. Now the same system publishes messages from its new leader without being able, or perhaps without wanting, to show him.
In the first weeks after his appointment by the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that selects Iran's supreme leader, intelligence services and media inside and outside the country waited for one thing: his Nowruz address. The Persian new year, which falls around March 20, brings the leader's most closely watched speech of the year, and a video would have answered the essential questions at once. He would have been demonstrably alive, apparently well, and visibly in charge.
No video came. The absence stopped looking like a security precaution and started looking like a condition.
The record since has only deepened the ambiguity. There is no photograph, no audio, no film.
Written statements have appeared, attributed to his office rather than demonstrably from his hand. The absence of anything verifiable, no image, no voice, no signature, has weakened the official account of his health and strengthened the theory that he was gravely wounded.
The effect on the state has been visible. Officials who held together in the first days of the war have since split over what comes next, and the fault line runs through the war-or-negotiation question: the state broadcaster has censored the government's own negotiators, while hardline outlets have claimed the leader opposed the process that produced the Islamabad agreement. Both camps invoke him. Neither can produce him.
So the question is whether any of this can work in the system's favor.
Absence as possibility
Consider what visibility would cost. If Mojtaba Khamenei appears and the marks of injury or incapacity are apparent, the Islamic Republic must concede that its leader is diminished. If his death is confirmed, the succession fight begins. If he turns out to be healthy and active, he must accept responsibility for the decisions of the past six months, including a war.
Absence suspends all three. He can be alive, wounded, incapacitated or dead, and the machinery of the state can go on issuing orders in his name.
Uncertainty, which ought to be the government's problem, becomes its instrument.
While the leader's status remains unresolved, no faction can settle the succession, and no official has the standing either to accept defeat or to wind the system up. Commanders and institutions can continue to say they take their orders from the center, a center that may exist but cannot be seen.
That has a second edge, and it cuts the other way. The same fog that prevents anyone from declaring the system finished also prevents anyone from commanding it. An absent leader cannot arbitrate between the men arguing over war and diplomacy, which is very likely why they began arguing in the first place. Ambiguity buys the system time by denying it direction.
Still, on this reading, even the collapse of the state's outer structure would not necessarily be the end. A network of the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, the intelligence services, financial channels and allied forces across the region could carry on in the name of an absent leader. What would survive, in that case, would no longer be a government. It would be an underground organization.
From state to network
The comparison that follows is about mechanics, not equivalence. The question is narrow: how does a network continue after it loses its territory or its leader disappears? On that specific question, two cases are instructive, and neither is offered as a moral parallel to a state that has governed 90 million people for nearly five decades.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the Islamic State's caliphate from a mosque in Mosul in July 2014 and did not appear on camera again for almost five years, though audio messages attributed to him continued to circulate. In that period the group lost nearly all its territory and became a network of clandestine cells. After he was killed in 2019, a US Defense Department inspector general assessment found his death had produced no immediate decisive effect on the group's operations.
Osama bin Laden spent almost a decade in hiding while releasing video and audio messages. His evasion of capture became, for his followers, evidence of invulnerability. Killing him destroyed that impression but did not destroy a network that had already devolved into regional branches.
The Islamic Republic is far better equipped for that kind of afterlife than either. It has governed for close to half a century. It has trained personnel, security intelligence, economic resources, religious institutions and cross-border networks. Driven underground, it would not be starting from nothing.
A familiar pattern of absence
Absence also carries a particular charge in Shia religious culture, and this is where the Islamic Republic has a vocabulary ready to hand.
Twelver Shia Muslims believe the twelfth imam, who vanished in the ninth century, is alive but hidden and will one day return. During the period known as the Lesser Occultation, roughly 874 to 941, his instructions are said to have reached his followers through four successive deputies who spoke on his behalf. The Greater Occultation, in which he remains hidden and has no named deputy, has continued ever since.
This is not a claim about religious rank. Mojtaba Khamenei holds no such standing for Shia believers, and the comparison is not about status. It is about the function of absence: a person who cannot be seen can still be treated as present. Intermediaries speak in his name, and waiting takes the place of proof.
The Islamic Republic itself was built on a theology of absence. Its constitution justifies the rule of a jurist explicitly as an arrangement for the era of the hidden imam, which means the state has spent 47 years governing on behalf of a leader nobody can see. Its propaganda apparatus therefore has both the language and the precedent to convert the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei into a kind of hidden presence.
That possibility is not indefinite. The longer the absence lasts, the harder it becomes to distinguish a genuine order from a manufactured one, the sharper the competition among those claiming to speak for the leader, and the more insistent the question: who is actually giving the orders in Tehran?
Mojtaba Khamenei's absence will probably not save the Islamic Republic from military defeat, economic collapse or social unrest. It may, however, allow it to go on existing after such a collapse.
As long as the fate of the absent leader remains unclear, the system's followers can treat the fall as temporary, the defeat as unfinished and the return as possible. Because sometimes governments continue not because they are still standing, but because their death has not yet been proven.
The reserves, intended to cushion severe shortages and emergencies, have been tapped at a pace in recent weeks that has prompted warnings from experts within the state about the consequences of continuing, the sources said.
Remaining fuel stocks could be depleted within several weeks if withdrawals continue at the current rate, limiting the government's ability to offset disruptions to domestic production or imports and prevent widespread supply stoppages, according to the sources.
The growing reliance on strategic stocks has also opened a dispute between the government and the Revolutionary Guards over how long withdrawals should continue, they said.
Revolutionary Guards officials oppose unrestricted use of the reserves, while government officials want to keep drawing on them to keep filling stations operating and contain public concern over shortages and higher prices, the sources added.
Daily shortfall strains supplies
Iran produces about 120 million liters of gasoline a day but consumes around 135 million liters, leaving a daily deficit of about 15 million liters.
Ali-Akbar Saghab Esfahani, head of Iran's Energy Optimization and Strategic Management Organization, put the daily gasoline shortfall at 14 million to 15 million liters on August 15.
Before the shortage intensified, imports covered about half the gap, much of it through fuel supplies from Russia, the sources said.
A US maritime blockade, Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining infrastructure and the closure of the Caspian Sea supply route have sharply restricted Iran's ability to maintain those imports, according to the sources.
Iranian diplomatic efforts to secure alternative fuel supplies from allies and neighboring countries have yet to produce an agreement.
Britain and Qatar have meanwhile backed a new US economic campaign against the Islamic Republic, as Washington seeks to restrict its financial, shipping and energy trade routes.
Fuel moved to reopen Tehran stations
Gasoline shortages have reached Tehran, forcing some filling stations to close, according to information obtained by Iran International.
Authorities have ordered fuel transferred from neighboring provinces to reopen some stations in the capital, but dozens of others remain at risk of closure, the sources said.
Videos and messages sent by citizens have also documented long lines, station closures and difficulties obtaining gasoline in Tehran, Alborz, South Khorasan and Razavi Khorasan provinces.
The Tehran regional manager of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company attributed temporary closures at some stations to a sudden rise in demand and congestion along fuel transportation routes.
Reports from citizens suggest the disruption is also affecting transportation costs. Several people told Iran International that fares charged by ride-hailing services Snapp and Tapsi had risen sharply as fewer drivers accepted trips.
“Gas stations are crowded, GPS doesn't work and you can't work for Snapp. Fares have gone up, but there are no drivers to accept the trip. We're left without money and without gasoline,” a Tehran resident told Iran International.
Another citizen said the cost of a regular Snapp journey had risen from 1,000,000 rials last month to 3,200,000 rials, while a resident of Shiraz described steep increases in ride-hailing fares despite no gasoline shortage there.
A Snapp driver said fuel consumption from running air conditioning for passengers required him to refill about every two days, but his quota had been exhausted and purchases outside the quota were limited to 25 liters.
Other messages sent to Iran International accused authorities of deliberately restricting supplies before a possible price increase.
“When they want to raise the price of cooking oil, they say there isn't any. When they want to raise the price of rice, they say there isn't any. But after the price goes up, everything is available,” a resident of Mashhad said. “Now it's gasoline's turn.”
The Mashhad resident said filling stations were not receiving enough gasoline but predicted supplies would become readily available if authorities raised prices.
Another citizen questioned why a gasoline deficit of 10% to 20% was causing such widespread disruption and accused authorities of deliberately making fuel scarce to make consumers more willing to accept higher prices.
“Many gas stations are either closed or have no gasoline to distribute,” a Tehran resident said, also accusing the government of diverting fuel for foreign currency earnings.
Another message accused authorities of using the shortage as justification for a gasoline price increase and manipulating distribution to create congestion at filling stations and reduce resistance to higher prices.
“Half of Pakdasht's gas stations have no gasoline and the rest are extremely crowded,” a resident said. “They are trying to force people to accept higher gasoline prices.”
Government weighs three options
The government is considering three responses to the shortage: limiting gasoline supply to domestic production levels, reducing subsidized quotas and selling additional consumption at the unrestricted price, or shifting fuel quotas from vehicles to individuals.
Concern that higher gasoline prices could trigger protests has encouraged the government to use strategic reserves to buy time, the sources said.
Fuel price increases have been politically sensitive in Iran. A sudden rise in gasoline prices in November 2019 triggered nationwide protests followed by a deadly state crackdown.
The attempt to delay harder choices by drawing on emergency stocks is now creating another problem, according to Iran International's sources: the buffer intended to protect Iran during severe supply disruptions may itself be only weeks away from exhaustion.
