ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The absence of a budget law and a finance minister in Kurdistan means that expenditure and revenues are not being monitored or audited, potentially contributing to corruption, a Transparency International (TI) official said at an Erbil forum on Thursday. In the Kurdistan Region "there has been no budget law for the past three years and no minister of finance,” Ghada Zughayar said at a panel discussion titled “Rule of Law and Combating Corruption.” The Kurdistan Region’s finance minister was sacked last October, together with three fellow ministers from the Gorran Movement, following riots in the Kurdish city of Sulaimani in which the offices of the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) were attacked. “That means that expenditure and revenues are being made without monitoring or auditing,” Zughayar said, speaking at the first Economic Forum of Erbil’s Middle East Research Institute (MERI). She also noted that in 2008 the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) began working on an assessment program for good governance and that a year later it began work on a roadmap for good governance and integrity. That was supposed to result in a Bureau of Integrity. “It was only ink on paper and nothing was implemented,” the TI official noted. The aim of the two-day MERI forum, which opened on Wednesday, was to bring experts and officials together to discuss matters of great importance to Kurdistan, such as implementing economic reforms, making Kurdistan competitive and combating corruption. The forum takes place amid a severe economic crisis in the Kurdistan Region, brought about by financial problems with the central government in Baghdad, the war with the Islamic State, problems with oil exports and the sluggish price of crude. Ahmed Haji Rasheed, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for Integrity in the Iraqi parliament, said that the problem in Kurdistan and Iraq was not of revenues, but of mismanagement of funds. “We don’t have problems with revenues, we have lots of revenues,” he said. “We have problems with mismanaging revenues. That is why it is important to respect the rule of law,” he said on the panel. Zughayar noted that the fight against corruption has also been undermined due to problems in the Kurdish parliament. Since last October’s troubles in Sulaimani the parliament speaker, who was also a Gorran member, has been prevented from entering Erbil, paralyzing the Kurdish legislature. Zughayar noted that Iraq ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world: in 2012 it ranked 18 out of 100 on TI’s corruption scale and last year it ranked 16. On that scale, the lower the ranking the higher the level of corruption. Zughayar said that Iraqis in general do not trust their government, and that her organization would soon publish a poll showing that 47 percent of Iraqis believe that most organizations in the country work in the interests of political parties, 34 percent of Iraqis do not believe in parliament and 26 percent do not trust judges or the judicial system. Iraqis also replied that, based on their own experiences, they had paid bribes to judges in their daily lives. Fifty percent said they had paid bribes to obtain government jobs. “Iraq has been classified as one of the worst countries in terms of corruption” Zughayar said. She also criticized Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, noting that when he come to power he vowed to root out corruption and crack down on government workers who draw salaries but exist in name alone – their salaries paid to officials who collect under fabricated names. She noted that payments by Baghdad to the Shiite Hashd al-Shaabi militant that is allied with the government were completely non-transparent. “The Hasd al-Shaabi figures, in terms of payments made for services and agreement and salaries -- on the ground things are completely different” to what Abadi had vowed, Zughayar said. She noted that the United States had supported Iraq with weapons and other means to the tune of a massive $24 billion, meant to enhance the military’s war against the Islamic State. “But this is clearly not reflected on the ground. Based on this, we can talk about a number of issues, the first being that there is a complete absence of transparency,” Zughayar said. “Iraq is supposed to have an unbiased audit system. But I can tell you that the prime minister himself needs to sack the chairman of the integrity office because there is no integrity or transparency,” she said. She urged the Iraqi government to bring offenders to justice instead of keeping findings secret and brushing problems under the carpet. Whether in Kurdistan or the rest of Iraq, “corruption cannot be tackled without political will at the top,” she said.
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