Iran's president to testify in fraud case

TEHRAN, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is called to answer to lawmakers over a $2.6 billion fraud case, but an analyst said the administration should survive.

More than 70 members of the 270-seat Iranian Parliament signed a petition calling on Ahmadinejad to testify about alleged economic misconduct, al-Jazeera reports.

"The petition to question the president has reached the minimum of signatures required. It was handed over to the presiding council," Hossein Sobhaninia, an Iranian lawmaker, was quoted as saying.

Ahmadinejad is expected before Parliament within the next 10 days in connection to a $2.6 billion bank fraud case, the largest in the country's history, the report said.

The two-term president has been at odds with the country's top clerical leaders for most of the year. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, commenting last week on Iranian links to a plot to kill the Saudi envoy to the United States, said it wasn't clear who was calling the shots in Tehran.

But Foad Izadi, a professor of political communication at Tehran University, told al-Jazeera that Ahmadinejad should emerge from the fraud case unscathed.

"From the beginning, he has said he is going to fully cooperate with the judicial system to address the problem," he said. "None of the people who are actually his opponents are implicating him in this scandal."