About Sarmayeh

Sarmayeh

Sarmayeh was a Persian-language daily business newspaper published in Tehran, Iran. Its name meant The Capital, and for several years it was one of Iran's leading economic dailies and one of the few remaining newspapers willing to criticise the economic policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government. The paper's editorial stance was pro-reform. It was founded and owned by Hossein Abdo Tabrizi, a prominent economist and former head of the Tehran Stock Exchange, and its editors included the economist Saeed Laylaz, an outspoken critic of the government, and Bahman Ahmadi Amouee, whose reporting questioned the government's handling of Iran's oil revenues. The paper was destroyed in the crackdown that followed the disputed presidential election of June 2009: Laylaz, Amouee and reporter Jila Baniyaghoob were all arrested, Amouee and Baniyaghoob were later designated prisoners of conscience, and on 2 November 2009 the Press Supervisory Board annulled the paper's licence and banned it.

An economic daily with a reformist stance

Sarmayeh was a daily business newspaper, written in Persian and published from Tehran, whose title announced its subject: sarmayeh is the Persian word for capital. Its news focus was economics and business, and media assessments of the late 2000s counted it among the only moderate papers with higher circulation numbers still on the market, alongside Etemad-e Melli, the party paper of former parliament speaker and presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, and Etemad. Of those three, Sarmayeh was distinguished by its economic focus rather than a party affiliation. Its editorial stance was nevertheless clearly pro-reform, and it was described by Reuters at the time of its banning as a leading business daily critical of the economic policies of Ahmadinejad's government. In a media landscape in which the state controlled broadcasting entirely and most surviving print titles avoided sustained criticism, a business daily willing to interrogate government figures occupied a distinctive and exposed position: economic reporting in an oil state inevitably raised questions about corruption, public spending and the distribution of oil income, and Sarmayeh raised them.

Founder and ownership

The founder and owner of Sarmayeh was Hossein Abdo Tabrizi, one of Iran's best-known financial economists. Tabrizi, born in Tehran in 1951, had served as secretary general of the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2003 to 2005 and as an adviser to the Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance from 2001 to 2005, and he was the founder of EN Bank, which he chaired from 2001 to 2003. He taught finance at several Iranian universities, including Sharif University of Technology, Tehran University and Shahid Beheshti University, sat on the editorial boards of financial journals and wrote standard works on financial management, financial markets and investment. His ownership connected the newspaper to the professional world of Iran's capital markets rather than to a political party. When the paper was banned, it was managed by Tabrizi, and his public response to the official justification for the ban became part of the paper's record: the authorities cited the fading qualifications of its licence holder, and Tabrizi replied that the listed qualifications, which included Iranian citizenship, being at least 25 years old, scientific qualification and commitment to the Iranian constitution, had not changed in his case.

Editors and editorial team

The paper's editors were Saeed Laylaz and Bahman Ahmadi Amouee. Laylaz was an economist and journalist, a professor at Tehran's Shahid Beheshti University, a former adviser to President Mohammad Khatami and a member of the Executives of Construction Party. He was a pro-reform critic of Ahmadinejad whose position at the paper made Sarmayeh a recognised platform for dissenting economic analysis. In the 2009 presidential election Laylaz was a key adviser in the campaign of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, a role that placed the paper's editor at the centre of the opposition effort. Amouee, the other editor, regularly critiqued the Iranian government's economic policies in the paper's pages, calling the nation one of the most corrupt in the world. The paper's best-known reporter was Jila Baniyaghoob, who served as its social affairs editor and who had begun her journalism career at the daily Hamshahri while studying at Allameh Tabataba'i University. The combination of credentialed economists and campaigning reporters gave the paper a character different from the party dailies of the reform era: its authority rested on professional expertise, and its criticism was framed in the language of accounts, budgets and revenues.

Reporting on oil revenues and corruption

The paper's most consequential journalism concerned Iran's oil income. In 2008 Amouee wrote an article questioning why the government could not account for 238 billion US dollars in oil revenues. The article exemplified the paper's approach: it used the government's own economic record as the basis for criticism at a time of high oil prices, when the Ahmadinejad administration's spending was a central political controversy. Amouee's broader charge, that Iran was one of the most corrupt countries in the world, was quoted in international commentary on the paper. Such reporting made Sarmayeh a persistent irritant to the government well before the 2009 election. Its criticism was economic rather than ideological, directed at the management of the national wealth, and it came from writers whose professional standing made it difficult to dismiss. That profile helps explain both the paper's influence and the severity of the measures eventually taken against its staff.

Women's economic reporting

Baniyaghoob used her position at the paper to open a subject other Iranian dailies neglected. While working for Sarmayeh she started a column on women's economy, which featured interviews with experts on the gender issues of economics. The column was cancelled in 2008 by the paper's management, an episode recorded in the citation for her later international awards and one that showed the limits operating inside the paper as well as outside it: even a reformist business daily had a more conservative management layer that could close down reporting on women's economic position. Baniyaghoob also covered women's rights activism for the paper, and was arrested in June 2006 when security forces attacked a peaceful gathering of women's rights activists in front of the University of Tehran which she was covering for Sarmayeh, and again in March 2007 while covering opposition to the Revolutionary Court's trial of women's rights activists, after which she was imprisoned in a wing of Tehran's Evin prison, blindfolded and subjected to numerous interrogations by the Intelligence Ministry. In September 2008 she was sent to prison after being found guilty of disruption of public order, failure to obey police orders and propagandizing against the Islamic regime. Her treatment illustrated, before the paper itself was touched, the personal cost attached to its reporting.

The 2009 election crisis

The presidential election of June 2009, in which Ahmadinejad was re-elected amid opposition allegations of voter fraud, plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 revolution and brought the state's confrontation with Sarmayeh to a head. Laylaz, a key adviser to the defeated Mousavi campaign as well as the paper's editor, was arrested at home on 17 June 2009, shortly after the election, as part of the general crackdown on journalists and opposition figures. He was among more than 100 opposition figures and journalists who faced a mass televised judicial proceeding in August 2009 on vague anti-state accusations, which the opposition denounced as show trials. On the night of 20 June 2009 the husband-and-wife Sarmayeh team of Baniyaghoob and Amouee were arrested at their home by plainclothes police officers, as part of the same crackdown; Baniyaghoob was released on bail sixty days later. The authorities arrested thousands of people after the vote, most of whom were later freed, but about 200, including Laylaz, remained in jail on charges of fomenting the post-election unrest.

The banning of the paper

On 2 November 2009 the Press Supervisory Board banned Sarmayeh. The official IRNA news agency reported that the board had annulled the authorisation for the publication of the daily because of repeated violations of the press law, without giving further details. Media sustainability reporting on Iran recorded a different official explanation in the case file: the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance's press deputy cited Article 11 of the Press Law, saying the closure was due to the fading qualifications of its licence holder and activities outside its defined mission, and panelists assessing Iran's media environment described poor management as the excuse used to ban a paper managed by Tabrizi. Tabrizi responded publicly to the qualifications claim, telling reporters that the qualifications list included Iranian citizenship, an age of at least 25, scientific qualification and commitment to the constitution, and remarking that his age had not decreased and he had not changed. Sarmayeh was one of five publications close to the Green Movement banned in Iran in 2009; the group included Hayat-e No, Etemad-e Melli, Arman and Farhang-e Ashti. In August 2009 the authorities had already shut down Etemad-e Melli, the newspaper of Mehdi Karroubi, after he angered hardliners with allegations that detained opposition supporters had been raped, a charge officials denied.

Trials and sentences of its journalists

The destruction of the paper was completed in the courts. On 2 December 2009 Laylaz was found guilty of taking part in illegal gatherings and holding classified information and was sentenced to nine years in prison; in March 2010 the sentence was reduced on appeal to three years. The Committee to Protect Journalists described the prison terms for Laylaz and for journalist Hengameh Shahidi as highly politicized and unjustified, noting that secrecy and procedural irregularities had marred both cases and that authorities had not even officially disclosed Laylaz's sentence. On 4 January 2010 Amouee was sentenced to a flogging of 32 lashes as well as seven years and four months in prison, on charges of gathering and colluding with intent to harm national security, spreading propaganda against the system, disrupting public security and insulting the president. In the same month Baniyaghoob was tried and convicted of spreading propaganda against the system and insulting the president; the court banned her from practising journalism for thirty years and sentenced her to a year in prison. She began serving that sentence at Evin Prison on 2 September 2012, the day after her last post on her blog, having been sentenced in June 2010 to one year in prison and the thirty-year journalism ban based on her writings about the pre- and post-election events of 2009.

International response and recognition

The cases of the paper's journalists drew sustained international attention. Amnesty International designated both Amouee and Baniyaghoob prisoners of conscience, detained solely for their peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression, and called for their immediate release. Human Rights Watch lobbied for Amouee's release, stating that his imprisonment was a violation of freedom of speech, and in 2011 named him a winner of its Hellman-Hammett award. Laylaz was likewise designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and his imprisonment drew protest from press-freedom organisations; Reporters Without Borders listed it as a press freedom violation. Baniyaghoob's work was recognised with major journalism honours: in 2009 the International Women's Media Foundation awarded her its Courage in Journalism prize, stating that she had fearlessly reported on government and social oppression, particularly as they affect women, and the following year she won the Freedom of Speech Award of Reporters Without Borders. She was also editor-in-chief of the Kanoon Zanan Irani website, whose contributors inside and outside Iran provided news about women's issues and which was repeatedly filtered by the Iranian government.

Legacy

Sarmayeh was remembered as the business daily that applied professional economic scrutiny to a government that treated such scrutiny as sedition. Founded by the former head of the Tehran Stock Exchange, edited by a university economist who advised both a reformist president and the 2009 opposition candidate, and staffed by reporters who asked where 238 billion dollars of oil revenue had gone and how economic policy bore on women, it represented a form of Iranian journalism grounded in expertise rather than faction. Its end followed the pattern of the post-2009 crackdown in full: the editor arrested within days of the election, the reporting team arrested at home, the licence annulled on administrative grounds its owner publicly refuted, and its journalists sentenced in proceedings that international organisations condemned. No relaunch was reported, and the paper's name survived chiefly in the award citations and prisoner-of-conscience campaigns attached to the people who had produced it.