The UK government has been urged to impose sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after reports that Iran's new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei owns more than a dozen luxury properties in London.
After Mojtaba Khamenei was chosen to succeed his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader who was assassinated on February 28, reports emerged of his alleged interest in £50 million ($67 million) of London flats, prompting the local member of Parliament to call for government action. Joe Powell, Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater, said additional sanctions were needed to “clamp down on dirty money”.
Deep concern
“I’m deeply concerned at media reports that the new Ayatollah has a London property empire including in Kensington and Bayswater,” he wrote on X. “It’s vital sanctions are urgently considered – and this is an example of the importance of an accurate foreign property register to clamp down on dirty money in our capital.”
The apartments concerned are in a block overlooking the Israeli embassy in London – near Hyde Park in West London – while similar allegations have been made about 11 mansions in Hampstead that formed part of a sanctions order by the British government last year.
The properties are believed to have been bought by a person already under UK sanctions over suspicions of acting as the IRGC's financier.
Responding to the revelations, Lord Walney, the government's independent adviser on national security and extremism until February 2025, called for extensive new sanctions on the Iranian leadership and the IRGC.
“This level of direct regime leadership control surely passes the test that we've placed on for Russian infiltration,” he said on Wednesday, with reference to punitive measures imposed on Putin-linked oligarchs with assets in Britain after the invasion of Ukraine.
“We just need to be clearer than we have been that Iran's hostility in the region is an unwelcome threat to the UK. The government has been unwisely teetering on the edge of that and the lack of clarity doesn't help.”
Luxury property portfolio
The apartments are on the sixth and seventh floors of a building close to Kensington Palace and were sold in 2014 and 2016 for a combined total of £35.75 million. An investigation also found 11 mansions on Bishops Avenue, Hampstead, referred to as “Billionaires' Row”, linked to the new supreme leader.
Together, these properties are estimated to be worth around £200 million.
The growing pressure comes as the government introduced new powers to shut down charities promoting extremist ideas, which experts say could help end a suspected network linked to the Iranian regime.
Around 30 charities in the UK, many of them mosques and Islamic centres, are suspected of being “soft power” tools for the Iranian regime, which espouses an anti-western ideology, according to a report by Lord Walney published on Wednesday.
But the Charity Commission, a regulatory watchdog, has been plagued for years by its inability to close down organisations deemed to have links to extremists.
Eight out of 10 of the charities named in Lord Walney’s report are under investigation.
“Even if a charity is found to be misbehaving, the Charity Commission can’t do anything because by its own statute it can’t close anything,” said Kyle Orton, a London-based terrorism and national security researcher.
A case in point was a 2022 investigation into the Islamic Centre for England, which is identified in Lord Walney's report and has been repeatedly accused of having links to the Iranian regime. It followed complaints that a speaker there had praised the late Iranian general Qassem Suleimani as a “soldier of Islam”, after the US-designated terrorist was killed in an air strike in Baghdad in 2020.
Last year, the Charity Commission told the institution to remove a clause in its constitution that required at least one trustee to be the official UK religious representative of the supreme leader in Iran. The Islamic Centre for England drew further criticism last week for hosting commemorations for the death of the elder Mr Khamenei.
'Spread the ideals'
Mr Orton told The National that simply imposing reforms on charities linked to the Iranian regime was ineffective.
Another centre named in the report is Labaik Ya Zahra in Watford, north of London, whose leader Syeda Umme Farwa was pictured receiving an award from late Iranian president, Ibrahim Raisi, in 2018.
She was later hosted in Iran by a senior IRGC commander Majid Hashemi Dana. During that trip, the state media platform Defa Press said she had signed a memorandum promising to “spread the ideals and discourse of the Islamic Revolution”, the movement in Iran in the late 1970s when the country turned away from a monarchical hierarchy and became a theocracy.
Many instances in which Islamic centre leaders have met senior IRGC members would become criminalised if the Guards were themselves proscribed, Lord Walney said.
“The proscription of the IRGC looms large over all of this,” he said. “It would make shutting down the soft-power network much easier if you have properly identified the IRGC as the terrorist organisation that it is.”
Both the Islamic Centre of England and Labaik Ya Zahra, as well as others named in the report, have repeatedly denied the accusations against them, insisting their work is of a religious nature.
That could now change as UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has announced government plans to strengthen the Charity Commission’s powers to close down institutions that promote extremism.
Officials will work with the regulator to speed up the investigative process for charities suspected of engaging in or promoting extremist behaviour.
Ms Nandy said she was giving the Commission “the teeth it needs to act fast and decisively”.
She said: “Charities are the lifeblood of our communities and we will not allow extremists to hijack their good name. We will close the door on those who exploit charitable status to spread hate and open a new chapter that gives the sector the protection it deserves.”
Mr Orton warned there could still be hurdles in how the new powers are implemented. “It's possible this will get watered down in the process of passing it, or that the implementation will mean the formal new powers are rarely actually used. But, as stated, this seems a really positive move.”
Political doctrines
Lord Walney’s report suggests that fears of triggering a racism row may be at the heart of the commission’s inability to properly close down charities with alleged links to Tehran.
Mr Orton said charitable groups accused of being connected to the Iranian regime made “efforts to hide” their links and were backed by UK laws protecting freedom of religious expression.
But he added that the centres were teaching “Khomeinism”, a brand of political Islam championed by the leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which blends theological teaching with Marxist principles.
“The doctrines they are teaching are more of a political nature than a religious one,” he said. “It is more in the nature of propaganda recruitment. They are explicit about their loyalty to the supreme leader as God’s representative on Earth.”
After pressure from MPs, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and London's Metropolitan Police Police have banned the annual Al Quds Day march that had been scheduled for Saturday, over its alleged links to the Iranian regime. The pro-Palestine march was first established by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
But critics say the event glorifies the Iranian regime and proxy armed groups that are proscribed in the UK.
The march is organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which described the decision as “baseless” and part of an “orchestrated hate campaign”.
