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Kurdistan
Begard Talabani, Kurdistan Region Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources. File photo: Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Kurdistan Region’s agriculture minister announced Sunday she was taking a local company that had “faked” her signature to import hundreds of tons of eggs and thousands of tons of sheep gristle to court.
“For the purpose of undertaking legal measures to move a lawsuit against Ensko Company for General Trade, which has faked our ministry’s letter, we call on your Honor to undertake necessary legal measures,” Begard Talabani, Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources said in a formal letter to judges at Erbil’s Investigative Court.
According to the agriculture minister, Ensko Company for General Trade used a fake template and signature of hers to import the eggs and gristle.
“The letter [allowing trucks to pass through border crossings] has been written based on a fake template that doesn’t match with our ministry’s. The letter’s writing is full of obvious technical and managerial mistakes, and it has been sent to the Directorate of Bashmakh Customs,” the minister claimed on Saturday.
A copy of the fake permission document purportedly giving consent “to import 10,000 tons of frozen gristle” through the Kurdistan Region, to be used for soap production at a factory in Baghdad, is undersigned by the agriculture minister. The document contains no mention of eggs.
The minister’s lawsuit follows revelations by two Kurdistan Parliament MPs that vast quantities of eggs and sheep gristle, whose import to the Kurdistan Region are banned, have been imported continuously for months.
Gorran MP Ali Hama Saleh gave details on the corruption case in a Facebook post titled “big secrets in the biggest case of corruption.”
“Following three months of close monitoring at all border crossings… we have established through full evidence that there is plunder and theft,” Saleh said in a Saturday Facebook post. “Some people, for money, are willing to have us all be inflicted with the worst illnesses.”
Saleh’s claims were later echoed by opposition MP Soran Omar Saeed, who provided data on the case.
According to Saeed, 40 trucks of eggs and gristle are imported to Iraq daily through the Bashmakh and Parvezkhan border crossings with Iran. In the first week of December alone, 283 trucks of eggs were imported through the crossings.
Both Saleh and Saeed claimed that a truck transporting gristle was customs taxed at $30,000, while each truck of eggs was taxed over $10,000.
“We summoned the director general of customs and border crossings to parliament…he said that at the crossings, they say close your eyes until the smuggled eggs and gristle pass, and open your eyes once they pass,” Saeed added.
“You know full well that the one doing this smuggling, plundering and taxation and importing of eggs and gristle is armed and powerful, and you know well whose cousin and brother they are,” Saeed added, calling on the government to stop this “scandal and lawlessness” if it is serious about uprooting corruption.
The import of eggs was banned by Iraq to protect local produce amid high levels of Turkish and Iranian imports, while the import of gristle is banned by Iraqi veterinary quarantine law, according to Talabani.
This is not the first egg-related blunder at Kurdish customs points. On November 27, Erbil’s authorities destroyed 81 tons of rotten eggs bound for northern Syria.
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