Word: shahs
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...these assets, of course, are immovable and now in the hands of the Khomeini government (as are the famous crown jewels). But the Shah could easily have transferred cash income from them to banks abroad before his downfall, though stories of such transfers have so far proved unverifiable. Information on the Shah's holdings outside Iran ranges from sketchy to nonexistent. The New York lawsuit lists only four in the U.S. The most prominent is a 36-story Manhattan skyscraper owned by an American branch of the Pahlavi Foundation...
Whatever the size of the Shah's personal fortune, he ran a corrupt government from first to last. Foreign companies frequently had to pay "commissions" to government officials or members of the royal family to get any kind of contract in Iran. One example: between 1973 and 1975 the Bell Helicopter division of Textron Inc., which was selling choppers to the Iranian air force, paid a $3 million commission to a company that turned out to be secretly owned in part by a brother-in-law of the Shah. The Shah indirectly acknowledged the corruption by periodically announcing drives...
Author Graham believes that the Shah's motives in tolerating the corruption, and in guiding the network of investments of the Pahlavi Foundation, were less personal aggrandizement than a desire to retain tight control of the Iranian economy and win the loyalty of subordinates by lavish financial favors. Nonetheless, the Shah in power lived very well, to put it mildly. He shuttled among five palaces in Iran. Journalist Fallaci, interviewing the Shah in 1973 in one of them, noted that "almost everything in the place was gold: the ashtray that you didn't dare dirty, the box inlaid...
...Shah's life in exile, since he fled Iran last January, has been considerably less grand but still rather more than comfortable. In Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he lived for almost five months before coming to the U.S. for medical treatment, he occupied a rented four-building compound with spacious gardens set inside a twelve-foot wall. He can afford a personal security force and a staff of servants-and he pays the $975-a-day bill for his New York hospital suite promptly. But the Shah last week whiled away much of his time in the unregal pastime that...
...part, it was a perceptive comment. The Shah had become isolated from his people. He failed to realize how deeply they hated the corruption and police terror, how seriously the country's Westernization offended its Islamic traditions, how much the middle class on which he pinned high hopes yearned for political expression as well as material prosperity. But the wall was built not by his advisers but by the Shah himself...