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Much of the Shah's wealth was funneled into the Pahlavi Foundation and several others, established ostensibly to fund charitable activities, like aid to the handicapped. The New York lawsuit asserts that the Iranian state budget "provided annually a subsidy of approximately $10 million" to the foundations. In addition, it says, "plaintiff [the Khomeini government] is unable to account for several billion dollars of revenues earned by the National Iranian Oil Co. between 1973 and 1978." In 1976 alone, it asserts, Nice's receipts as published by the company were $1 billion less than the NIOC earnings reported by the Central Bank of Iran; the suit implies that the $1 billion went into the Shah's foundations. While no proof is offered, the practice is by no means uncommon; other national oil companies also set aside sums for undefined state purposes.
Though the foundations did do some charitable work, the Shah invested most of their money in income-producing assets. In a new book, Iran: The Illusion of Power, British Journalist Robert Graham published a 3½-page list of holdings of the Pahlavi Foundation that he was able to track down as of the end of 1977 and that he estimated to be worth $2.8 billion to $3.2 billion. They included total ownership of Bank Omran, one of Iran's largest banks; 80% ownership of Bimeh Melli, the nation's third largest insurance company; and full or partial interests in auto factories (10% of GM Iran), cement plants, sugar mills, housing projects and a string of hotels, including the Tehran Hilton. Indeed, Graham estimates that the Shah, through the foundation, once owned 70% of all the hotel beds in Iran.
All these assets, of course, are immovable and now in the hands of the Khomeini government (as are the famous crown jewels). But the Shah could easily have transferred cash income from them to banks abroad before his downfall, though stories of such transfers have so far proved unverifiable. Information on the Shah's holdings outside Iran ranges from sketchy to nonexistent. The New York lawsuit lists only four in the U.S. The most prominent is a 36-story Manhattan skyscraper owned by an American branch of the Pahlavi Foundation.
Whatever the size of the Shah's personal fortune, he ran a corrupt government from first to last. Foreign companies frequently had to pay "commissions" to government officials or members of the royal family to get any kind of contract in Iran. One example: between 1973 and 1975 the Bell Helicopter division of Textron Inc., which was selling choppers to the Iranian air force, paid a $3 million commission to a company that turned out to be secretly owned in part by a brother-in-law of the Shah. The Shah indirectly acknowledged the corruption by periodically announcing drives to root it out, but he never succeeded in doing so—if, in fact, he ever really tried.