Hassan Rouhani

Iran could allow Internet giants such as Google to operate in the Islamic republic if they respect its "cultural" rules, Fars news agency said on March 1 quoting a senior official.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said Jan. 4 that foreign investors should no longer be viewed as a threat and signaled his country’s decades-long isolation from the world economy could soon end.

Corruption thrives in the absence of free media, according to Masoumeh Ebtekar, the first female vice president of Iran, who has called on the Iranian and Turkish governments to work together against corruption.

Iranian authorities have arrested 12 people for syphoning off more than $4.5 billion (3.6 billion euros) from one of the country's main banks over several years, media reported Dec. 11.

The reports come amid government vows to clamp down on corruption in a bid to revive an economy devastated by decades of international sanctions.

Award-winning Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested on Dec. 10 on unknown charges, her husband said, weeks after she was barred from practising for three years.
      
The couple's car was surrounded by intelligence agents on a highway in Tehran, Reza Khandan wrote on his Facebook page.
      

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani warned Dec. 8  that corruption poses a threat to the Islamic republic, pinning the blame in a thinly-veiled attack on powerful monopolies that control the economy.
      
"The people made the revolution in order to wipe out corruption," Rouhani told delegates at a conference in Tehran.
      

Iran's telecommunications minister has said his technicians are developing a system to identify any Internet user in the country at the moment of log-on, the ISNA news agency reported Dec. 8.

Iranian Economy Minister Ali Tayyebnia, who conveyed Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's invitation to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a meeting in Istanbul, has said Iran has been attracting investment requests from the western world amid hopes for a change in its business environment.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tuesday that Iran would not sink "to its knees" over its disputed nuclear programme, his first comment since a missed deadline for a deal.
      
"In the # nuclear issue, arrogants have made their best to bring # Iran to its knees but they were not able and will not be able to do so," a tweet on his @khamenei_ir account said.