Mojtaba Khamenei attended the funeral ceremony of Vahid Haghanian's brother

In recent years, Vahid Haghanian has cropped up in a number of other different guises. Some have spoken of his alleged relationship with to Mahafarid Khosravi, an Iranian businessman executed in 2014 over a $2.4bn bank fraud, as well as his having a stake in the private airline  Meraj. These aspects of his CV, though, remain mostly in the dark. In 2018, some principalists protested against the involvement of Vahid Haghanian in certain matters of state. Regime insider Ezatollah Zarghami wrote that Haghanian had "arbitrarily" interfered in the process of electing Saied Reza Ameli as secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution.