Friday, May 20, 2011
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
Iran's constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council, has said that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot run the Oil Ministry as caretaker, the Fars news agency reported Friday.
Ahmadinejad last week dismissed his oil minister Massoud Mirkazemi and took over the ministry himself, which would have also made him rotating chairman at June's OPEC meeting in Vienna.
The president argued that he planned to trim the cabinet and one of his decisions was to abolish the Oil Ministry and merge it with the Energy Ministry.
The decision caused widespread criticism in Iran and eventually the Guardian Council, which overseas the compliance of governmental and parliamentary decisions with the constitution, rejected the plan as illegal.
Ahmadinejad is involved in a row with the country's clergy and conservative factions over his reform plans, which include reducing the cabinet from 21 ministries to 17.
But the main reason for the disputes is the president's s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, whose daughter is married to Ahmadinejad's son.
Mashaei is said to oppose the clergy-dominated framework of the Islamic republic's establishment and favors of a more nationalist approach to running the country.
Ahmadinejad has also been criticized for having so far supported Mashaei and effectively joined him in undermining the Islamic system.
The president denied the accusation in a televised interview but observers believe that the crisis would continue as long as Mashaei acts as the president's close adviser.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has been ruled under the Vali Faqih system, in which one senior cleric at ayatollah level has, according to the constitution, the final say on all state affairs and can even veto decisions by the president.
The supreme leadership has been in the hands of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since 1989. Ahmadinejad has been criticized by several some clergy for allegedly having disobeyed Khamenei's order over reinstating the country's intelligence chief who was fired by the president.
Copyright 2011 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
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