Former Iranian Vice President Hamid Baghaei says that he has been sentenced to 63 years in prison after being convicted on corruption charges he contends are baseless.
Baghaei has 20 days to appeal against the sentence, which observers suspect is a warning to former President Mahmud Ahmadinejad from the hard-line conservative judiciary.
The head of the justice department in Tehran Province, Gholam Hossein Esmaili, said that Baghaei was facing several sentences on different charges, and that by law he will have to serve the longest sentence.
Esmaili did not give a specific sentence length, describe the charges, or say when Baghaei was convicted. He said others had been sentenced in relation with the same case.
Baghaei, who served as vice president in charge of executive affairs in 2011-13, during Ahmadinejad's presidency, was briefly detained in 2015 on corruption charges.
The powerful Guardians Council prevented him from running in the May 2017 presidential election, and he was jailed for a few weeks in July. https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-former-vice-president-baghaei-prison-conditions/28643189.html
His verdict comes amid a verbal dispute between Ahmadinejad and the head of Iran's powerful judiciary Sadeq Amoli Larijani, who has been accused by the former president of dictatorship and incompetency.