“When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989, he built his own system of patronage by building a network with the I.R.G.C.,” said Alireza Nader, an Iran expert at the nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an author of its report “The Rise of the Pasdaran: Assessing the Domestic Roles of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.” Saeed Ghasseminejad, an economist, and the political scientist Emanuele Ottolenghi, writing in The Wall Street Journal, estimated that the Revolutionary Guards Corps controls about 20 percent of the market value of companies traded on Tehran’s stock exchange, across the telecommunications, banking, construction, metals and mining, automotive and petrochemical sectors. Mr. Nader said the corps was also involved in sanctions-busting and the smuggling of alcohol and drugs into Iran, both forbidden under Islamic law.

The corps also runs large parts of the economy. Since 2006, Al-Monitor reported, it has been awarded at least 11,000 development projects, from construction and aerospace to oil and gas. Khatam al-Anbiya, a company that acts like the United States Army Corps of Engineers on the construction of roads, bridges and public works, subcontracts to firms owned by businessmen with connections to the Guards.

To his credit, soon after he won the presidential election last year, Hassan Rouhani called on the Revolutionary Guards Corps to limit its economic activities to only a few national projects. But the corps is not alone in amassing wealth. According to the American conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, “The hard-line clerical establishment has gained great wealth through control of tax-exempt foundations that dominate many economic sectors.”

A recent Reuters investigation of Ayatollah Khamenei’s economic empire found that Setad, a foundation ostensibly set up to help the poor but controlled by the supreme leader without oversight, is worth $95 billion. Part of its modus operandi is to appropriate real estate, allegedly by claiming — often falsely — that it is abandoned. According to Mr. Ottolenghi and Mr. Ghasseminejad, Ayatollah Khamenei also controls three of the 10 banks listed on the Tehran stock exchange.