Tehran debates austerity as US targets sanctions lifelines

Hojjat Niki-Maleki identifies himself on LinkedIn as chairman of Digikala Group, having joined the board as a representative of Harakat Aval, the investment arm of the mobile operator MCI. An official company filing lists him as a board member without specifying the chairmanship.

The change dates to June 10 but became public only when the formal notice was published this week, according to the Iranian technology outlet Digiato.

Niki-Maleki previously headed communications for the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order, commonly known as Setad, a conglomerate built largely on property confiscated after the 1979 revolution, controlled by the office of the supreme leader and under US sanctions. He also spent more than four years on MCI’s board.

His earlier work was in hardline media. He ran Afsaran, an online platform that promoted anti-Western messaging and the authorities’ concept of a cultural “soft war.”

His social media history also shows an affinity with the military establishment: in January 2020 he posted a photograph of himself seated beside Qasem Soleimani, then commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, on an aircraft.

“I told him I was the son of a martyr, and his respect for me doubled,” he wrote, describing Soleimani embracing him at an airport. “The sweet taste of my conversation with Haj Qasem is still with me.”

Hojjat’s father, Hossein Niki-Maleki, was a member of the security team aboard Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the United States in 1988.

Boycott calls

The appointment prompted calls on Persian-language social media to stop shopping at Digikala, with critics pointing to his Setad connection, his politics and his role promoting Iran’s domestic Covid-19 vaccine.

“Do not buy from Digikala. This is something you can do,” one user wrote on X, arguing that purchases would ultimately help finance Revolutionary Guards missiles and drones.

Another framed the appointment as part of a wider expansion of state-linked influence over the company.

Much of the criticism returned to the vaccine. Niki-Maleki worked for Setad when its pharmaceutical arm developed CovIran Barekat, the domestically produced Covid-19 vaccine that authorities promoted during the pandemic, and he repeatedly used his own accounts to publicize its production and effectiveness.

That program became politically charged after the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei barred imports of American and British vaccines in January 2021. Critics argued that relying on domestic production delayed access to sufficient doses while Iran struggled to vaccinate its population, and some hold the officials who promoted it responsible for deaths that followed, a charge they have never accepted.

“He used to come here every day two years ago and hashtag that there would soon be good news and we would make a coronavirus vaccine,” one user wrote.

About 150,000 people died from the pandemic across Iran, one of the heaviest official tolls in the region. Turkey, with a population of similar size, recorded roughly 100,000. Saudi Arabia reported fewer than 10,000 and the United Arab Emirates around 2,400. What each of those countries did have was early access to Western vaccines, the ones Iran’s Supreme Leader had ruled out.

A pattern, not an appointment

The reaction reflects something larger than one board seat: a sequence of events that has moved Iran’s most prominent private technology company steadily closer to the state.

Digikala was founded in 2006 by the brothers Hamid and Saeid Mohammadi and grew into the country’s dominant online marketplace, the most recognizable business to emerge from Iran’s private technology sector.

The pressure began in the summer of 2023, when police sealed its offices after photographs circulated of female employees without compulsory hijab.

In February 2024, the judiciary filed charges over products it said insulted Islamic sanctities, after users circulated images of mugs sold on the site bearing the name Fatemeh Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad. The company’s chief executive, Masoud Tabatabai, was arrested on the order of the security prosecutor’s office and released hours later pending further appearances. Pro-government vigilantes painted threatening messages on the company’s building.

That same month, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of Kayhan and Khamenei’s representative at the newspaper, said management of digital companies such as Digikala and the ride-hailing platform Snapp would “fortunately” be transferred to those “who serve the state.”

Negotiations over a stake in Digikala also began in that period. They concluded this spring, when Harakat Aval, MCI’s venture capital arm, bought 40 percent of Digikala Group in cash, taking over the holding of the venture firm Sarava Pars along with parts of other shareholdings.

The agreed valuation was 300 trillion rials, about $146 million at current market rates, in what the company called the largest investment in the history of Iran’s digital economy.

Digikala said the founders would retain 22 percent and two of five board seats, along with executive management, business strategy and the selection of senior managers, and that no single shareholder would control the company.

MCI’s own ownership is the point critics return to. Iran’s largest mobile operator is a subsidiary of the Telecommunication Company of Iran, privatized in 2009 in a sale to a consortium widely reported to be linked to the Revolutionary Guards.

Niki-Maleki’s appointment points to a wider shift in Iran’s digital economy: the steady expansion of state-linked institutions into businesses built as private enterprises – which is also why a prediction made in a hardline newspaper in 2024 reads today less like a threat than a schedule.