IRGC spokesperson Brig-Gen Hossein Mohebbi appeared to play down Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s claim last week that his government had allocated 20 million barrels of oil to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force to support the war effort, saying that “it is the government’s responsibility to support the armed forces,” according to footage released by the IRGC-linked Fars News Agency.
“I honestly don’t have any information about this matter. As for the claim that, for example, 20 million barrels of oil were given to the IRGC so it could wage war, I have no knowledge of that,” the spokesperson said. “However, it is the government’s responsibility to support the military forces so they can fight. The IRGC, naturally, needs funding to confront the enemy. It needs weapons, equipment, and support for its various units, and the government is obligated to provide that funding.”
Mohebbi’s assertion of Tehran’s responsibility did not touch upon the fact that the IRGC’s oil allocation already tripled last year, security expert Roger Macmillan explained to The Jerusalem Post.
In April last year, Iran published a new budget law which saw $12.4 billion directly allocated to the regime’s armed forces and their specialized military projects, triple the figure previously published.
Macmillan commented that the formal budget is only “part of the picture,” as “the oil allocated to the military is priced at a subsidized exchange rate of around 600,000 rials per euro, against an open-market rate of 1.14 million. That gap effectively doubles the IRGC’s purchasing power on every barrel it receives.
“On top of that, a further €7.5 billion in oil revenues disappears into budget lines described only as ‘special projects’ with no breakdown, no parliamentary scrutiny, no public accounting.”
Unlikely Iran would give oil to IRGC, spokesperson claims
Despite the apparent absorption of the country’s oil, Mohebbi claimed that it was “unlikely” Tehran would have given the oil, as “the IRGC doesn’t really have the organizational structure to handle that.”
As Reuters documented last week, the IRGC has a successful sprawling commercial oil empire and is expected to be one of the largest beneficiaries of the sanctions relief granted under the MoU with Washington. Four senior Iranian sources described how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was uniquely positioned to capture a large share of any financial rewards that would accrue from sanctions relief, renewed oil exports, and foreign investment.
“The IRGC is the entity pulling all the strings behind the oil sector,” Jeremy Paner, a former Treasury Department sanctions investigator, told Reuters.
As noted by Macmillan, the IRGC has its own parallel oil infrastructure alongside the state’s National Iranian Oil Company, the sanctioned Shahid Purja’fari Oil Headquarters, with shadow companies and sales networks extending beyond the Gulf to China, operating without civilian oversight.
“This is not a military budget line; this is a state-within-a-state with its own energy company,” Macmillan stated, theorizing that the larger tit-for-tat on oil allocations was truly about the IRGC’s growing power and the increasingly weakening positioning of the president.
“The political consequences of this arrangement are now visible at the top of the Iranian government. Pezeshkian attempted to appoint his own intelligence minister and was blocked. He sought an urgent meeting with Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and received no response,” Macmillan commented, adding that Pezeshkian’s comments last week were “not a disclosure but a controlled leak from a man who knows he is being strangled.”
Informed sources told the diaspora site Iran International in April that the IRGC had blocked presidential powers as part of a measure to have a security perimeter erected around the core of power, seizing more central power.
“This points more and more to a militia with a state,” Macmillan remarked.