Ottawa’s decision to keep signing federal contracts with an Edmonton businessman under active investigation for alleged work on Iran’s missile program was not a one-off lapse. It fits a security-screening gap the Auditor General of Canada had already documented, in detail, more than two years before the case became public.
A Global News investigation published Sept. 2, 2026, identified the businessman as Mohammad Reza Ghafouri Fard, 45, who does business in Canada as “Sal Ghafouri” and is the son of Hassan Ghafouri Fard, a former vice-president of Iran. His companies, Melanite Group and Radian Group, collected more than $2 million in federal and provincial contracts, including from the RCMP and the Department of National Defence, according to the outlet, which cited a declassified Canadian Security Intelligence Service report and thousands of pages of immigration records.
Immigration investigators flagged Ghafouri for national-security reasons as early as 2017. CSIS completed its own security-screening report on him in January 2023, alleging he had worked on Iran’s Shahin air-defence missile system and a covert procurement network that sourced restricted components from third countries, including the United States, to get around sanctions. Yet his companies continued winning federal work afterward: Melanite received a $15,000 federal technology grant in 2024 and a Canadian Armed Forces contract six months later, Global News reported. In May 2026, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told Ghafouri it was moving to deny him citizenship on the grounds he is a security threat; through his lawyer, he strongly disputes the CSIS allegations. The Deep Dive independently corroborated the core findings the same day, cross-referencing public CanadaBuys procurement records that show a $103,478 National Defence contract awarded to Melanite in 2020.
What that reporting did not connect is how closely the case matches a systemic problem Canada’s Auditor General had already put on the record. In a June 2024 report examining federal contracts awarded to McKinsey & Company, the Office of the Auditor General found that for 13 of 17 contracts carrying security requirements, the responsible departments and agencies could not demonstrate that the individual consultants working on them actually held the security clearance the contract required. That finding had nothing to do with Ghafouri specifically, but it describes precisely the kind of failure his case appears to illustrate on a larger scale: government departments awarding and renewing contracts without confirming, or apparently checking at all, whether the people performing the work had cleared the security bar the contract itself set.
The Auditor General’s report also found that Public Services and Procurement Canada, the government’s central purchasing authority, routinely failed to challenge departments that awarded multiple related contracts to the same vendor in short order, a pattern echoed in Ghafouri’s case, where Melanite kept winning federal and provincial work for the better part of a decade after the first red flag was raised, according to Global News. University of Ottawa political science professor Thomas Juneau, who reviewed the CSIS report for that investigation, put it bluntly: Canada’s security agencies operate in silos so rigid that, in a case involving alleged missile-program work for a sanctioned military, the system “just goes to the other extreme.”
Neither CSIS nor Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada would comment on the Ghafouri file when asked by Global News, and none of the federal agencies that contracted with his companies responded to requests for comment. That silence leaves open the question the Auditor General’s 2024 findings already anticipated: whether Ottawa has since tightened the link between security-screening results and live procurement files, or whether departments are still awarding and renewing contracts without confirming a vendor has cleared the checks a security requirement is supposed to guarantee. Parliament’s Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, which requested the McKinsey audit, has not said whether it plans to revisit contract-security compliance now that a case involving alleged foreign military work has surfaced. Until it does, or until Ottawa publishes evidence the gap has closed, the Ghafouri file stands as the starkest illustration yet of a weakness auditors described in the abstract two years ago.
via Global News. Original reporting: globalnews.ca/news/12040736/iran-vp-son-edmonton-awarded-government-contracts-csis-investigation-missiles
