TEHRAN: Turkish mobile phone operator Turkcell is not alone in feeling short-changed in the cut-throat Iranian bazaar, where nationalist politics are as attritional as bargaining and bureaucracy.

Turkcell is poised to join companies such as BP, Halliburton and General Electric which have realized it is the wrong time to strike deals with the oil-rich Islamic Republic.

Conservative lawmakers last week slashed to 49 percent from 70 percent the stake that Turkcell had signed for in a new mobile phone network — a $3 billion deal it won in the country’s biggest ever international tender last year. Turkcell has hinted it is ready to walk away empty-handed rather than accept the new deal structure.

“Everywhere else in the world they ease the conditions for foreign investment, whereas we do the opposite,” said Ahmad Motamedi, telecommunications minister in President Mohammad Khatami’s increasingly isolated reformist government. “This will affect all foreign investment in the country,” he was quoted saying in last week’s newspapers.

Religious conservatives took over a large parliamentary majority in May after thousands of reformists were banned from standing in February’s election.

These conservative parliamentarians have opposed a raft of foreign investment deals, attacking both Renault’s attempts to build the economy L-90 car in Iran and accusing oil giant Shell of “excessive cultural influence”.

They also took a strong nationalist line against Turkcell, accusing it of links to their arch-foe Israel and said it could pose a risk to national security by tapping phone lines. Another Turkish firm, TAV, was booted out of a deal to run Tehran’s new airport despite investing $15 million on a goodwill basis. It was also charged with jeopardising national security.

The roots of protectionist nationalism in Iranian politics lie in the fall of Mohammad Mossadeq, the prime minister who was ousted in a 1953 U.S.-British coup after he nationalised the country’s abundant oil reserves. Since 1953, there has been an abiding sense that foreign commercial interests lead to political interference.

Pragmatists versus traditionalists: Economic analyst Saeed Laylaz said the new parliamentarians were not so much making a show of strength to the reformist government, whose days are numbered, but to business-minded conservatives who could succeed them this summer.

“Generally their strategy is that of isolation, in politics, culture and economy. This is an approach which differentiates them from other conservatives,” he said of the traditionalist parliamentarians.

The pragmatist conservative camp is personified by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The Expediency Council, a legislative arbitration body which Rafsanjani heads, in October reworked a key plank of the constitution, paving the way for the privatisation of core sectors of the economy currently under state control. “With this bipolarisation of the conservative camp, a showdown is inevitable,” said one Tehran-based political analyst, who declined to be named. For lawmakers the key is to retain state control. “The sacred cow is to be able to say they have 51 percent,” said Albrecht Frischenschlager of Tehran’s Atieh Bahar Consulting. “In practice, on less high-profile projects, the Iranians have said they are ready to give up management on a project, but on paper it is 51 percent.”

Reuters