IRGC Shifts Sanctioned Oil Network From UAE to Russia, Oil Minister Ousted

In the weeks before a regional conflict erupted, Saeed Sadeghi left Iran for Moscow at his father's direction. The younger Sadeghi, a longtime operative within the Revolutionary Guards' oil apparatus, had just been removed from his post at the National Iranian Oil Company after trustees—intermediaries tasked with selling Iranian oil and returning the proceeds—failed to deliver $8 billion in revenue. His departure to Russia was not a retreat. It was a repositioning. Over the following months, while the war consumed the region's attention, Sadeghi worked on a financial engineering project: moving the mechanism by which the IRGC Intelligence Organization collected money from sanctioned oil sales away from the United Arab Emirates and into Russia's banking system.

His father, Brigadier General Hossein-Reza Sadeghi, a senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guards commander-in-chief, oversaw the broader effort. The elder Sadeghi held positions of deep institutional trust within the Guards—he headed the office responsible for special oversight of IRGC Intelligence on behalf of the Guards' top commander. Two sources with direct knowledge of these operations told Iran International that father and son were central to preserving what had become a sprawling corruption network: an IRGC-controlled system of oil trustees who had collectively failed to return $11 billion in proceeds from Iranian crude sales.

The shift from the UAE to Russia became operational in June. On the sixth of that month, Mohammad Javad Bavand—a former deputy head of IRGC Intelligence's economic affairs division who had previously represented the Guards on Iran's Supreme National Security Council sanctions committee—was appointed as the oil minister's special assistant for sales. Eleven days later, Iran's Central Bank governor traveled to Moscow and visited Mir Business Bank, a Moscow-registered institution owned entirely by Bank Melli Iran. The bank, which has operated since 2002, provides the correspondent accounts and currency services that connect Iranian financial institutions to Russia's banking network. The United States had sanctioned it in 2018 for facilitating transactions on behalf of sanctioned Iranian entities. Now it would become the new conduit for oil revenues.

The trustees' money would no longer flow through the UAE. Instead, proceeds from oil sold by these intermediaries would be returned to Iran through Russia's Mir financial network—a replacement for SWIFT, the global banking system from which Iran had been cut off by American sanctions. The sources said the establishment of this new IRGC trustee network was approved by Mehdi Sayyari, the newly installed acting head of IRGC Intelligence. At the same time, a separate network of oil intermediaries linked to Iran's Intelligence Ministry, known as Shayan, came under internal scrutiny and its director was removed.

The corruption these networks concealed had become impossible to ignore. Iran International's investigation identified nine trustees in the IRGC network, including children of senior security officials—among them Ali Rezaei, son of the Supreme National Security Council secretary. The investigation also revealed confidential documents showing that Bavand had assigned the sale of 86 million barrels of Iranian oil to four trustees who already owed money from previous transactions. When these reports were published, an IRGC commander known as Moshfegh, deputy head of the Revolutionary Guards' media headquarters, held a confidential meeting with Bavand and a former deputy for economic affairs at IRGC Intelligence. The sources said the meeting's purpose was to suppress further reporting on the trustees' corruption.

On Sunday, October 5th, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency reported that Iran's Central Bank had found an alternative route to repatriate money held by the trustees and had transferred $1.5 billion in Iranian oil revenues through Russia's banking system. The announcement was framed as a solution—a way to recover funds that had been stuck in intermediary hands. Hours after the report appeared, Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad resigned. President Masoud Pezeshkian accepted his resignation the same day. The two sources told Iran International that Paknejad's removal and the shift in the money-transfer route were part of the same effort: to preserve the IRGC Intelligence Organization's oil-sales network and the financial flows it controlled.

Paknejad's departure marked the completion of what the sources described as the Revolutionary Guards' project. The financial architecture for handling sanctioned oil revenues had been rebuilt. The trustees—the same intermediaries who had failed to return $11 billion in proceeds—would continue their work, but now their money would flow through Moscow instead of the Emirates. The restructuring did not resolve the underlying problem of missing billions. It consolidated control. It moved the machinery of the operation beyond the reach of oversight, into a banking system already isolated from the West and therefore less vulnerable to further American pressure. The question of where $11 billion in oil proceeds had gone remained unanswered. The question of accountability remained unasked.