How Britain CHEATED Iran Out Of Half Its Oil Money For 25 Years

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]He makes a lot of changes, a lot of good changes, a lot of bad changes to Iran, right? First of all, I don't know if we talked about this at the beginning, but when we open this episode, Iran just had like 100 miles of paved road in the whole country, country that's size of three times Texas, right? That's definitely not a good statistic. So, he builds more roads, builds railways, hospitals, schools. So, he's doing a lot of stuff using the oil wealth that he's getting and just, you know, modernizing the country. He also implements a military draft in the country. And because of the draft he also tells everyone to hey everyone's got to have a last name. So this is when he changes his name from Raja Khan to Rajasa Palvi.

[00:00:37]Palovi is some old Iranian name probably has a lot of historical importance. So he takes over. Now another interesting point here that comes in is by the way from 1921 to 1925 you already get some hints of like what this guy's going to be like. It's not going to be someone who likes democracy, free elections and stuff like that, right? So when there's a vote in parliament quote unquote, there's just one person who's against Raja Khan becoming Asha and that person is Mosedc. He's the only guy who's opposing him in 1925. He got elected to the parliament from somewhere. He lost his first election in 1906 but by now he is elected to the parliament and he's the only person who's opposing Rajakhan.

[00:01:19]He's basically saying that this guy is going to be a dictator which again does turn out to be true. So that's another interesting thing that Mosedc has been there all this time. Now Sha Dashak Khan is Raj Sha is seeing all this right. So one of the first thing he does try to do is like make sure he breaks the election. So Mosedc is not part of the parliament anymore. So a year or two after he he becomes the Sha Mosedc like not winning elections anymore. So he just I don't know if there's officially house arrest if he's placed on house arrest in his house but he basically you know pulls himself back from the public life after this for a while not forever but for a while but yeah a lot of good things bad things happening in Iran all this time this basically this is what happens you know democracy free elections a lot of the issues especially if you're someone who doesn't like the sha you a lot of your rights are probably you're not going to be treated nicely I think that's the appropriate way of putting it but he's also building up Iran too in this time when we get to 1930s he stops looking at the deal that the old Sha signed [music] where Iran is only getting 16% of the net profits so he's like we got to renegotiate this somehow right so he builds a team the team is like how do we get a better deal so they start looking at everything more closely they realize it's not just that the deal is bad they're not even getting the deal the bad deal that they signed so this team looks at like what the company is declaring in London as to like how much money they have made and in London they said they have made 200 million. So this is from 1908 when they first found oil to 1933 in that 25 years they have made £200 million in profit. Okay. And based on that Iran should be getting 32 million because 16% right but in reality Iran just got 10 million. So they already have a bad deal to begin with and they're not even getting that.

[00:03:11]They're getting less than half of what they should be getting, which is already bad.