Fourteen Iranian Companies Named in Foreign Annual Reports

An Iranian company that publishes nothing can still be on the public record, because somebody else has already written it down. We have covered one route into that record before: a shareholder with its own reporting duties, which is why Irancell reports its numbers in Johannesburg and why the audited notes of Iranian venture funds carry exit prices for private companies. This note is about a second route, and it is the plainest one there is: the foreign company on the other side of the relationship describes it, by name, in its own annual report.

Large multinationals publish a great deal about their corporate structure. A group with a subsidiary in Iran usually lists it, with the city and the percentage held, in the companies-of-the-group table at the back of its financial statements. A telecom operator with an Iranian roaming partner usually names the partner. These pages are public, they are in English, and they are read by almost nobody, because they sit in the last forty pages of a four-hundred-page document. Tehran Index read ten such reports and found fourteen Iranian entities named in them. Our own registry, built from the Iranian side, held three.

What the reports actually say

The first thing to notice is how small the numbers are. VEON discloses gross revenue from its Iranian roaming arrangements of about 196 dollars from Irancell, 1,019 dollars from Rightel and 1,847 dollars from Mobile Telecommunications Company of Iran, to the cent, in an annual report. Telefonica reports 7,467 euros from Irancell and 474,806 euros from MCI. Arm reports that its parent’s Iranian roaming produced no revenue at all. These are not amounts anyone would report for their size, and that is what makes the set useful: the reports name relationships that a materiality test would never surface, which is the opposite of how corporate disclosure usually works.

The second is that the same handful of Iranian operators appear again and again. Irancell is named in all five telecom filings we read. Rightel is named by Turkcell and VEON, Taliya by Turkcell and Telefonica, Telecommunication Kish by Telefonica alone. None of Rightel, Taliya or Telecommunication Kish has a Tehran Index record, and the near miss is worth naming so nobody reproduces it from a loose search: our registry carries Iran Kish Credit Card, a payments processor, which is a different company from the Telecommunication Kish that Telefonica names.

The third is the one detail in the whole set that a reader could not get anywhere else. Nokia states that it is the controlling shareholder of an Iranian company, names it, names its minority shareholder, and says in its own audited annual report that it cannot exclude the possibility that the minority shareholder is owned or controlled by the government of Iran. There is no Iranian filing that says any of that. We have opened a registry record for Pishahang on the strength of it, and marked plainly on the record that everything we hold about the company comes from a foreign issuer’s filing rather than from an Iranian registry document.

The blind spot, and it is a large one

This is not a map of foreign business in Iran, and the reason is structural rather than editorial. A company appears here only if it publishes a detailed annual report, and a company publishes one only if it has outside shareholders who require it. Every large private company is therefore invisible to this method, however substantial its Iranian operation.

Tetra Pak is the example to hold on to. It runs an office in Tehran on Valiasr Street and has supplied Iran’s dairy and juice industry for decades, which makes it one of the more consequential foreign industrial presences in the country. It is owned by Tetra Laval, a private group with no listed shares, so it publishes no companies-of-the-group table and no counterparty detail, and it appears in none of the ten reports read here. Nothing in this piece should be read as implying it is absent. The right conclusion is narrower and more useful: what follows is what foreign companies have written down about their Iranian counterparties, not the population of foreign companies in Iran, and the two differ most where ownership is private.

A second gap runs the other way. Some reports disclose an Iranian exposure and decline to name the counterparty, describing impaired Iranian receivables or Iranian bank guarantees without saying whose. A name search cannot find those, and we have not printed the figures we have seen because we have not yet read those documents at source. A number we have not opened does not go on the record.

Why the desk reads foreign annual reports at all

Because the Iranian side of the record has a ceiling. A private Iranian company publishes what it chooses, when it chooses, usually in Farsi and usually as a marketing document. Nearly everything with an auditor behind it arrives from somewhere else: Codal for listed issuers and for the venture funds that hold private ones, the Johannesburg exchange for Irancell and Snapp, a Swedish investor’s annual report for six of the companies we cover. Foreign corporate reporting is one more layer of the same kind, and it is the layer that names counterparties rather than valuing them.

What makes it worth keeping is the calendar. Annual reports land between February and May every year, dated and in English, which turns this into a repeatable sweep rather than a one-off. The method costs time and nothing else, and it is now part of the desk’s standing work as the Foreign Exposure census.

What we do not know

We do not know how many Iranian entities appear in reports we have not read, and we will not guess: these fourteen come from ten documents, not from a sweep of every annual report published. We do not know the Persian legal name, national identifier or registration number of Pishahang, or anything about its accounts, because Nokia publishes none of it. We do not know why Telefonica has published no equivalent disclosure for 2025, only that none exists as at 12 September 2026, and we will not speculate between a late filing, a changed listing status and an ended relationship. And we do not know who the unnamed counterparties in the receivable and guarantee disclosures are. That last one has a clear method and is the work we would run next.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Fourteen Iranian Companies Named in Foreign Annual Reports”, 12 September 2026. Disclosures read in the filings themselves on 11 and 12 September 2026: Nokia Corporation Form 20-F 2025 (page 117), Turkcell Form 20-F 2025, Telefonica S.A. Form 20-F 2024, VEON Ltd. Form 20-F 2025, Arm Holdings plc Form 20-F for the year ended 31 March 2026, AstraZeneca PLC Form 20-F 2025, Novo Nordisk A/S Form 20-F 2025, Unilever PLC Form 20-F 2025 exhibit 8.1, Nestle S.A. consolidated financial statements 2024 (page 171) and Roche Holding AG Finance Report 2024 (page 140). Registry counts n=403 records, 376 public, 303 public companies, 874 public facts, queried 12 September 2026. No valuation of any company appears here and no company’s revenue is inferred from a roaming settlement.