Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Ali Akbar Hashemi Bahramani was born on 25 August 1934 in the village of Bahraman near the city of Rafsanjan in Kerman Province, to a wealthy family of pistachio farmers. His family originated from the Mir tribe of Bala Gariva, and descended from a man named Hashem, who migrated to Bahraman and died around 1867. He had seven siblings. His father, Mirza Ali Hashemi Behramani, was a pistachio merchant, one of Kerman's famous businessmen. His mother, Hajie Khanom Mahbibi Hashemi, died at the age of 90 on 21 December 1995. One of his brothers, Mohammad Hashemi, is the former director of IRIB. From childhood onward Rafsanjani did not see himself as a peasant, according to family members.

He left at the age of 14 to study theology in Qom. There he became acquainted with the ideas of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the most senior dissident cleric who later became the founder of the Islamic Republic, on the political rule of the clergy. His other teachers were Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi, Mohammad-Reza Golpaygani, Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, Abdul-Karim Ha'eri Yazdi, Shahab al-Din Mar'ashi Najafi, Nematollah Salehi Najafabadi, Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, and Hussein-Ali Montazeri.

From his marriage to Effat Marashi in 1958, Rafsanjani had three sons: Mohsen, Mehdi, and Yasser, as well as two daughters, Fatemeh and Faezeh. Only Faezeh Hashemi chose a political life, which led to her becoming a Majlis representative and then the publisher of the weekly newspaper Zan (meaning Woman in English), which was closed in February 1999. In 2016, his daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, sparked a debate on religious persecution in Iran by visiting the female leader of the persecuted Baháʼí religious minority. The two women had met in prison, when Faezeh was serving a six-month sentence for "spreading propaganda against the system". Rafsanjani's daughter, Fatemeh is President of Charity Foundation for Special Diseases and Mohsen was chairman of Tehran Metro Organization and now is vice president of Azad University. His wife, Effat is the granddaughter of Mohammed Kazem Yazdi.

Assets

The Rafsanjani family took their name from his great-grandfather, whose last name was Hashem. When Akbar Hashemi was born, his father was a rich businessman with a valuable pistachio business.

Hashemi and his partners also owned Islamic Azad University, worth an estimated US$20–25 billion.

Rafsanjani's three sons own properties in Dubai, including two apartments in the Burj Khalifa.

Pre-Revolution struggles

When Bahramani was studying at Qom Seminary, he became interested in politics under Ruhollah Khomeini. He was one of the opposers of Mohammad Reza Shah's White Revolution and accompanied Khomeini. During this time, Bahramani adopted Rafsanjani, the name of his hometown, as his new surname and placed it behind his original surname as per clerical custom where a cleric traditionally adds the name of their hometown as their new surname. This opposition eventually led to his arrest and imprisonment. He was arrested 7 times from 1960 until 1979 and was in jail for four years and 5 months in total due to his clandestine activities against the Pahlavi regime. Khomeini made him the financial manager of the revolutionary struggle as well as the bridge with other revolutionary groups.

Among the groups that had a deep bond with Hashemi, was the Islamic Coalition Party, which is known as responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansur. This communication was another reason for his arrest. In prison, he found the opportunity to become familiar with other groups opposed to the Shah. In the mid-1970s, Rafsanjani travelled to various countries to evaluate the position of anti-Shah resistance groups abroad, including the United States, where his brother Mohammad Hashemi Rafsanjani was studying at the University of California, Berkeley.

Rafsanjani travelled across sixteen states during his two-week stay, where his brother showed him locations such as Hollywood, the Statue of Liberty, and Yosemite National Park. According to Rafsanjani's brother, a bear broke into their car at Yosemite after they ignored a sign warning visitors not to keep food in their car. Rafsanjani had previously been to the West, visiting several European countries with his wife and children. He made a habit of taking notes about these developed countries to study their living conditions, industry, and resources, in a desire to replicate the same prosperity in his home country. Upon his return to Iran, Rafsanjani was arrested by SAVAK and remained in prison until the victory of the Iranian revolution.

Assassination allegations

In a 2025 interview, Faezeh Hashemi, Akbar Rafsanjani's daughter, alleged that he was assassinated, not by Russia or Israel, but by the highest echelons of power in the Islamic Republic, because "he sided with the people and spoke out" and "he was in their way- so he had to be removed". Rafsanjani's other daughter, Fatemeh, stated that two months before his death she was approached by two individuals who threatened that he "would be killed in a way that would make it appear a natural death". The combination of suspicious circumstances surrounding his death has given additional clout to the allegations of foul play, these include delays in his transport to the hospital, blocked access to CCTV footage from his office and his supposed place of death, absence of post-mortem examinations despite the family's requests, and the disappearance of his diaries and will from his office soon after his death. According to Rafsanjani's family, the Supreme National Security Council's official report stated that his body contained radiation levels ten times the safe limit. The official investigation into the death of Rafsanjani was concluded by the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council at the time, Ali Shamkhani, who stated that it was "completely natural and without any ambiguity".

Accusations

Rafsanjani was sought by the Argentinian government for ordering the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. It was based on the allegation that senior Iranian officials planned the attack in an August 1993 meeting, including Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, Mohammad Hejazi, Khamenei's intelligence and security advisor, Rafsanjani, then president, Ali Fallahian, then intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Velayati, then foreign minister.

Tension with Ahmadinejad

After his loss at the presidential elections in 2005, a growing tension between him and President Ahmadinejad arose. Rafsanjani had criticized Ahmadinejad's administration several times for conducting a purge of government officials, slow move towards privatization and recently hostile foreign policy in particular the atomic energy policy. In return Ahmadinejad fought back that Rafsanjani failed to differentiate privatization with the corrupt takeover of government-owned companies and of foreign policies which led to sanctions against Iran in 1995 and 1996. He also implicitly denounced Rafsanjani and his followers by calling those who criticize his nuclear program as "traitors".

During a debate with Mir-Hossein Moussavi in 2009 presidential election, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani of corruption. Rafsanjani released an open letter in which he complained about what he called the president's "insults, lies and false allegations" and asked the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to intervene.