“We would like to inform that we have no objection to proceed with the proposal in the letter,” a letter from Sudani’s office said in response to an official request from Kurdish blocs in the Iraqi parliament for Baghdad to pay the salaries of cash-strapped KRG’s civil servants directly.
The demands put forward in said request are that “the regional government provides the federal government with employee data so that their salaries can be localized and transferred directly into their accounts,” and that “the funding of salaries shall be within the Region’s share in the federal general budget law.”
The KRG has struggled to meet its payroll for several years. Civil servants went unpaid for around 90 days before a deal was struck between Baghdad and Erbil in mid-September. The federal government agreed to lend Erbil 2.1 trillion Iraqi dinars to pay three months of salaries.
The government has also put a freeze on new hires and promotions as part of the austerity measures.
Exports of the Kurdistan Region’s oil through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline have been halted since March 23 when a Paris-based arbitration court ruled in favor of Baghdad against Ankara, saying Turkey had breached a 1973 agreement by allowing Erbil to begin independent oil exports in 2014.
The Iraqi and Kurdish governments have lost $7 billion since the oil exports were halted, according to the Assocation of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR).
There have been several meetings between Turkish, Iraqi, and Kurdish officials since March, but exports have yet to resume. Prior to the halt, around 400,000 barrels a day were being exported by Erbil through Ankara, in addition to some 75,000 barrels of Kirkuk’s oil.
