A copy of the budget bill was made public by Ahmad Haji Rashid, head of Komal’s bloc in Baghdad.
According to his figures, the projected revenues for 2019 are 105 trillion Iraqi dinars ($88 billion), while expenditures are estimated at 128 trillion dinars ($107.5 billion), leading to a budget deficit of 22 trillion dinars ($18.5 billion).
The Kurdistan Region will receive 12.67 percent, roughly 8 trillion dinars ($6.7 billion). It will also receive 136 billion dinars ($114 million) from the governorate development fund and a further 102 billion dinars ($85.6 million) in loans for investments.
The budget projections are based on oil prices of $56 per barrel. Iraq gets the bulk of its revenue from oil sales.
In post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, the Kurdistan Region received 17 percent of the federal budget annually. The figure was proportional to population estimates.
In 2014, Baghdad stopped sending money to Erbil completely after the KRG floated the idea of independently exporting oil.
The 2018 budget re-instituted the Kurdistan Region’s share, but at 12.67 percent after Baghdad amended population estimates.
Kurdish lawmakers said the budget law violated the constitution.
The preliminary draft of the 2019 budget was prepared by the outgoing Cabinet of Ministers and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Former Gorran MP Masoud Haider accused the ministers of politicizing the budget.
“The 2019 Iraqi budget bill contains violations of the Iraqi constitution and legal violations,” he stated in a post of Facebook on Wednesday.
Haider sat on the finance committee in the previous parliament.
He said that Abadi’s caretaker government has created “political hurdles” to stir up problems between Erbil and Baghdad.
Speaking on Rudaw TV Wednesday evening, Haider said the budget also contains some of the same problems that existed in the 2018 law.
“There is again an effort to undermine the constitutional entity of the Kurdistan Region,” he said, explaining that the draft bill refers to the Region as three provinces and not the legally-recognized Region.
He advised Kurdish lawmakers not to make compromises on the budget, especially during the process of forming the next government.
“We have to keenly insist on justice in the distribution of revenues of the Iraqi state,” he said.
Prime Minister-designate Abdul-Mahdi is in the process of putting together his cabinet.
There are no official numbers for the current population of Iraq. The last census was done in 1987. Kurdistan Region’s statistic office in coordination with UN agencies recently did a demographic survey in which they relied on 2014 estimates that put Iraq’s population at 36,004,552 and the Kurdistan Region’s population at 5,122,747, which is 14.2 percent of the total.
Updated at 9:53 pm
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