Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a decree on Monday laying the groundwork for the government to take over the Islamic Azad University, a quasi-private institution founded by a former Iranian president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, according to the Associated Press. The huge institution has branches throughout Iran and outside the country, and it enrolls more than half of its university students. It has long been the focus of a power struggle between the wealthy Rafsanjani family and their politically moderate allies on the one hand and the country’s conservative establishment on the other.

Ayatollah Khamenei announced that the university’s endowment had “major legal and jurisprudential problems,” according to Iran’s Press TV, a Tehran-based English-language news network. He relayed the finding in a letter to both Mr. Rafsanjani and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who this year tried but failed to pass legislation aimed at replacing the university’s governing structure. “The university was a major resource for opposition protests against the 2009 re-election of President Ahmadinejad, which opponents say was fraudulent,” according to the AP, which reports that Ayatollah Khamenei’s decree means that Azad “can now be taken over by the state.”