{"id":72046,"date":"2011-03-02T15:44:09","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T11:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=72046"},"modified":"2011-03-02T15:44:53","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T11:44:53","slug":"ahmadinejads-old-car-fetches-2-5-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/03\/02\/ahmadinejads-old-car-fetches-2-5-million.html","title":{"rendered":"Ahmadinejad’s Old Car Fetches $2.5 Million"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 1977 Peugeot 504 sold for $2.5 million (1.8 million euros) in an international auction on Tuesday, the State Welfare Organisation website reported.<\/p>\n

The “company who purchased the car for 25 billion rials wanted to remain anonymous,” it said after the auction in the southwestern city of Abadan, AFP reports.<\/p>\n

“My client bought the car because of a personal interest in President Ahmadinejad and his spirit of anti-arrogance and anti-Zionism,” said lawyer Mahmoud Esari, who acted for the firm that bought the car.<\/p>\n

Welfare Organisation chair Ahmad Esfandiari said “more than half a million bidders registered on the bidding website, with most saying they were doing so since President Ahmadinejad leads a simple life and because of his anti-arrogance and anti-Zionist stances.”<\/p>\n

He said there were bids from “Europe, Asia and the United States.”<\/p>\n

On January 1, Ahmadinejad launched a website (www.ahmadinejad-car.com<\/a>) to invite international bids for the car, with the proceeds funding a project to build 60,000 homes for the disabled and needy women who are providing for their families.<\/p>\n

Ahmadinejad has always cultivated an image as a “people’s president” and friend of the poor.<\/p>\n

After he was first elected president in 2005, he was required by law to make an asset declaration and listed a 40-year-old 175-square-metre (1,900-square-foot) house in a lower-middle class part of east Tehran, the contents of two bank accounts and his ageing white Peugeot.<\/p>\n

Following his controversial re-election in 2009, he vowed to put “housing, employment and economic reform” at the top of his agenda after house prices soared during his first term<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 1977 Peugeot 504 sold for $2.5 million (1.8 million euros) in an international auction on… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72013,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[13795,17661],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72046"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}