Mr. Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei who was speaking in a press conference Monday evening rejected claims made in the Parliament by specific Reformist MPs as 'efforts to deflect the Judiciary from addressing corruption;' Mr. Ejei believed what had been claimed as inordinate amounts to the Judiciary staff had merely been legal rise approved by the government as usual administrative rises in the payments, which had by no means been comparable even remotely with lump sums government officials had received in the Salary Bill Scandal.
Mr. Mahmoud Sadeqi, a Reformist MP from Tehran, had implicated the Judiciary when he told Parliament that personalization of state bank accounts had been illegal, claiming that the Judiciary Head Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani had personally collected the interests of huge sums in the Judiciary's accounts.
Mr. Sadeqi also had raised concerns that the Judiciary had reportedly paid lump sums as benefits to its staff which amounted to millions of dollars, to which Mr. Ejei responded, criticizing the claim as ludicrously conjectured; "the amounts and figures in Mr. Sadeqi's speech earlier in 2016 to the Parliament vastly overestimated the payments which were merely modest rises in staff salaries, sums which had been approved by the government," he told the press.
Mr. Mohseni Ejei also said that President Rouhani's questioning of arrest of some Telegram channel administrators was not properly responded; "the Telegram channel administrators have been arrested on charges which ranged from encroaching ethics of the society to high security-level violations; in the issue of implicating real persons, the Judiciary is the major player and the Ministry of the Intelligence would not be properly solicited as to the nature of the charges of arrested individuals," he emphasized.
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