Iran s regime hardliners continued their attack on President Rouhani on Saturday, targeting his remarks about "corruption" and the Revolutionary Guards. At a conference on corruption earlier this week, the President warned that money once "given under the table now is being given on the table". He called for the "elimination" of monopolies: "Anything which does not have rivalry or whose management is monopolised is flawed. This is wrong and the problem has to be uprooted."

The DoJ had maintained that Total paid around $60 million in bribes between 1995 and 2004 to get contracts for two major Iranian oil and gas projects. After the deal, it had agreed not to prosecute the French group under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Iranian authorities have reportedly asked for money in exchange for the bodies of two executed prisoners. In May 2014 two brothers, Abdol Jamal Zehi, 26, and Hamid Jamal Zehi, 22, were reportedly hanged to death in Chabahar Prison in southern Iran on drug trafficking charges. Iranian authorities reportedly refused to hand over the bodies of these two young men until their family paid 11 million Tomans (approximately $4,000).

Mahafarid Amir Khosravi was put to death at Evin prison, just north of the capital, Tehran. The fraud involved using forged documents to get credit at a top financial institution to purchase assets.

Former Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi has been the target of a lengthy judicial investigation into his possible role in several high-profile bribery and embezzlement cases that also spill into Turkey, as well as Central and East Asia.

Under the conservative presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the 39-year-old Zanjani was good enough at his work to amass a fortune of $10 billion - along with debts of a similar scale, he told Aseman - until he was arrested late last month. He is being held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, accused of owing the government, under moderate new President Hassan Rouhani since August, more than $2.7 billion for oil sold on behalf of the oil ministry.

The organization that has hounded was founded by Khomeini  "Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate Emam" - Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam - to manage and sell properties abandoned in the chaotic years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. has become one of the most powerful organizations in Iran, though many Iranians, and the wider world, know very little about it. In the past six years, it has morphed into a business juggernaut that now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.  The organization's total worth is difficult to pinpoint because of the secrecy of its accounts. But Setad's holdings of real estate, corporate stakes and other assets total about $95 billion, Reuters has calculated. That estimate is based on an analysis of statements by Setad officials, data from the Tehran Stock Exchange and company websites, and information from the U.S. Treasury Department.