Who is Isa Sharifi 2
50 billion Tomans spent on personal branding is Zakani’s only achievement
The news of the arrest of one of the legal managers of Tehran Municipality has strengthened the suspicion of the existence of a second Isa Sharifi during the conservative administration of Tehran Municipality. Although the news of Sharifi’s arrest, who was Ghalibaf’s right-hand man in Tehran Municipality, was kept secret for a long time and was even denied for a while, and his trial was held without media coverage, this time the conservative mayor himself has taken the lead and announced the arrest as a hero fighting corruption. Yesterday, he said that one of the legal department managers was arrested by internal entities within the municipality. This is a protective matter and cannot be further explained until its dimensions are clarified. We consider fighting corruption our duty and carry it out in a way that the people’s rights are practically restored. This is while Zakani had defended the legal performance of Tehran Municipality in a television program in July, claiming that we have transformed this center and a group of specialists concerned about public funds have become active in this organization.
The council’s voice has also been raised
Observations indicate that the most significant performance or achievement of Zakani during his tenure at Behesht has been the time and expense spent on self-promotion for personal branding, to the extent that the annual performance review meeting of the municipality did not even satisfy his co-partisan members in the council, leading to sarcasm and mockery. Some of his co-partisan members in the council said it seems Zakani has mistaken the performance presentation meeting for a mayoral election meeting. Jafar Tashakori Hashemi, head of the council’s city planning and architecture commission, sarcastically said that achieving the dreams mentioned by the Tehran mayor is very difficult and that in the past 11 months, we have not seen any substantial action from Tehran Municipality and we should not make promises to the people that will leave us indebted in the future and people expect from us. Another council member, Nasser Amani, also said Mr. Zakani is speaking in today’s meeting as if it is a mayoral election meeting, but we should know that 11 months have passed since the municipality’s activities, and we expected a report of these 11 months from the mayor. It has been said that the advertising of the 200-day performance report of the municipality has cost Tehran over 50 billion Tomans.
Mr. Camera
They say Alireza Zakani, the mayor of Tehran, from the very first days of his presence in Tehran Municipality, had a microphone attached to the corner of his coat and several cameras accompanied him at every event. The peak of this was seen in the Damavand flood and his muddy presence in Imamzadeh Davood, which became the subject of much satire and criticism. From filling Tehran’s advertising billboards with the 200-day performance report, which in essence was presenting routine and ordinary daily activities of the municipality, even from previous periods, as his own individual performance. Advertisements that some of the routine and ordinary activities of Tehran Municipality are, some statistics were fundamentally false and incorrect, like creating 32 fruit and vegetable markets in 200 days, which was never announced where in Tehran they were operationalized. Interestingly, fencing around 27 parks in Tehran under the title of Mother and Child Park and preventing men from entering these spaces, despite much criticism, has been registered as one of Zakani’s performance achievements. At the same time, when he was showcasing his actions with billboards in the eyes of Tehran citizens, social media users believed that the issue is that many of those things he boasts about are not his work, they were completed in the previous term and the operations reached his period. Or it’s interesting that Tehran Municipality advertises its duties with banners in our eyes.
Illegal Appointment
The post of Tehran Municipality was so vital for Zakani that he gave up being in the parliament and the presidency of the Research Center to sit in a position that Ghalibaf had occupied for 12 years. Zakani’s presence as the head of Tehran Municipality was faced with many controversies from the start, from legal issues in his appointment to the controversies involving his son-in-law, daughter, and brother-in-law, and recently his show-off presence in the Damavand flood has drawn much criticism. To take the post of managing Tehran Municipality, there is a need for a minimum of managerial executive experience or relevant expertise in the individual’s resume. Zakani had neither. The situation was so problematic that a conservative complained to the Administrative Justice Court about the Minister of Interior for ratifying Zakani’s appointment. Saleh Moftakh pointed out the lack of executive management experience and the irrelevance of Zakani’s nuclear medicine degree with the necessary credentials for urban management in his complaint and announced that the then Minister of Interior, without regard to the criticisms and objections even from the conservative spectrum, signed his mayoral appointment. Although in the end, the Administrative Justice Organization defined the municipality as a private sector and did not consider entering this area as part of its duties.
Nepotism
But the first assist Zakani gave in the position of managing Tehran Municipality was appointing his son-in-law as his advisor, the same son-in-law from whom he has a dual-nationality grandchild. Hossein Heidari is the husband of Maryam Zakani, and their child was born when Maryam Zakani was studying in Sweden. Zakani’s son-in-law, in cooperation with Rambod Javan, established the company Ideh Negar Arsh. As the criticism of this appointment intensified, Zakani was forced to backtrack and withdraw the appointment, but he tried to arrange a position for his other son-in-law’s brother by introducing him as the proposed Minister of Education to Raisi. However, even here his attempt failed. The nepotism in appointments had become so problematic that even Raisi did not accept this proposal and eventually appointed someone else instead.