As part of its recent campaign against unauthorized financial institutions, the Central Bank of Iran has launched an online system inviting citizens to use it to help the bank identify illegal credit and financial institutions. Citizens can visit the CBI website (www.cbi.ir) and report about possible illegal activities of financial institutions. The move is seen as the latest attempt by the central bank to bring all credit and financial institutions under a single umbrella as thousands of funds have been mushrooming in the past decade. More than 7,000 unidentified financial institutions are said to be operating across the country over which the CBI has no control, according to Ahmad Hatami Yazd, former CEO of Bank Saderat. The central bank, Hatami says “is not even aware of their existence.”
