Gholamhossein Karbaschi

Gholamhossein Karbaschi (, ; born 23 August 1954) is an Iranian politician and former Shia cleric who was the Mayor of Tehran from 1990 until 1998. He is considered politically reformist and is a close ally of former president Mohammad Khatami. He was arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges in what the New York Times claimed "was widely seen among moderates as a politically motivated attack" by the government's conservatives and hard-liners to thwart President Mohammad Khatami's reformist agenda. He was the General Secretary of Executives of Construction Party until 2021.

Background Karbaschi was trained as a cleric in the holy city of Qom and spent time in Evin Prison for his political activities before the Islamic Revolution.

Karbaschi was a driving force for many new modernization efforts. As the Mayor of Tehran he was known for having bulldozed apartment buildings and office buildings built without city approval, removed revolutionary graffiti from walls, planted thousands of trees, banned much of the private traffic in central Tehran and opened more than a hundred parks. Karbaschi also angered bazaar merchants by raising taxes and contributing to the city's soaring real estate prices, earning him the reputation during his time as mayor of "the most loved and hated man in Tehran."

Trial and imprisonment Karbaschi was arrested on 4 April 1998 on corruption charges. The prosecution of Karbaschi was called "the most prominent part of a campaign" by Iranian clerical conservatives "to thwart the reformist administration" of President Mohammad Khatami, rather than an honest attempt to "uncover and punish" financial corruption. The trial was often "a heated debate — at times a shouting match" — between judge Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei and Karbaschi, who holds the same clerical rank as Ejei. The trial "captured record audiences" while being broadcast on Iranian television, and was "debated in detail" in Iran's press. In January 2000 Khamenei agreed to decree his amnesty.

Post-release He is also the manager of Ham-Mihan, a new reformist newspaper published in Tehran. This newspaper was forced to stop publishing twice. Once in the collective ban of almost all reformist newspapers in 2000