The Security Blog

After some work related to a note I saw on Nico Pitney’s excellent blog at The Huffington Post, I wanted to discuss the following ‘blurb’ that was found in Russian, at . The original part of the article shows as:

Google’s automated translation translated it as follows:

"…About the beginning of mass withdrawal of money from Iran has learned from the words of an Italian intelligence sharing with the newspaper La Stampa the information that banks Saderat, Bank-e Melli, Bank-e Sepah and Melat in the last 48 hours have begun to transfer funds to Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia and the UAE. Money derived small tranches to $ 10 million According to the Italian secret services, abroad are transferred funds from various non-governmental funds under the control of the Islamic leadership of Iran."

Allow me to focus and clarify firstly on a single word in the Translation:

Bank e-Sepha

SEPHA, as a name, is the name of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. As seen on Wikipedia, the definition is:

"The Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (Persian:  Sepáh e Pásdárán e Enqeláb e Eslámi)" is a branch of Iran’s military, founded after the Iranian revolution.

Therefore, I assume that the bank is, in fact, owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Running money out of Iran. Nice.

Even "nicer" is the CORRECT Russian translation of the article above.  Allow me to focus on the latter part of the paragraph:

My Russian is rusty, but not that rusty…  here is what it is saying:

Many tranches (portions, amounts) of 10 Million USD$ are being sent out of Iran to locations [in Europe].  These funds are coming out of Islamic Leaders [PERSONAL ACCOUNTS] and not from accounts controlled by the official Government of Iran.

Double nice…

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