Prominent Australian academic denies links to powerful Iranian politician

A University of Melbourne academic has denied collaborating on research with the speaker of Iran’s parliament – who has been leading Tehran’s peace negotiations with the US – saying he was named as an author on a journal article without his knowledge. On Monday Guardian Australia revealed that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator, had built extensive ties to Australia over the past decade, including links to a University of Melbourne engineering research centre. In March 2023, Ghalibaf – a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander – appeared as co-author of a journal article with a University of Melbourne engineering academic, Prof Abbas Rajabifard, who leads the research centre that employed Ghalibaf’s son Eshagh seven years earlier. On Tuesday, Rajabifard told the Guardian he had “no involvement in the article” and had the journal remove his name from the paper earlier this year. The journal article was published shortly before the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, wrote to universities asking them to cease work with Iranian academics and institutions due to concerns about the regime’s human rights record. Rajabifard and Mohammad Ghalibaf – who is also an associate professor in political geography at the University of Tehran – both appeared as authors on the March 2023 journal article titled Explanation of the I.R.I’S Political Economy and Reconstructing of the Social Economy . …