Official: Iraqi parties smuggle billions of dollars of oil, gov’t powerless

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—A member of Iraq’s Integrity Commission that is tasked with investigating corruption and embezzlement says that oil smuggling is a major issue in Iraq and political parties or armed groups take crude oil out of the country with impunity.

“Oil smuggling is a serious thing in Iraq,” Ardalan Nuraddin, a member of the commission told Rudaw on Wednesday. “We’ve investigated many such cases with the ministry of oil and there’re political parties that carry out smuggling of crude oil.”

“This is not a secret,” Nuraddin said.

Nuraddin said that billions of dollars’ worth of oil has been smuggled out of Iraq in the last five years. “Corruption is also rife inside the ministry of oil itself,” he claimed.

Nuraddin said that the Iraqi ministry of oil does not reveal how much oil is extracted daily and only what is shipped out is measured.

“As a result of this a lot of stealing and smuggling takes place and this is not confined to the province of Basra alone,” he revealed. “It is the same in Baghdad.”

Nuraddin added that great amounts of oil are smuggled between Dora and Baghdad’s Rasafa “and unfortunately the government isn’t able to stop this corruption in the oil ministry or any other ministry for that matter.”

 

 

 

“There are other cases of corruption that neither Prime Minister Abadi nor anyone else in Iraq can tackle for many years to come and that’s because the ministries have been given to individuals from political parties,” Nuraddin said.

“Each party treats its ministry like personal property and handle every contract and deal that way,” he maintained.

Nuraddin went on to say that corruption is likewise rife in the ministries of education and electricity.

“Up to now more than 17 billion dollars has been spent on electricity from Iraq’s national budget and the state of electricity is still intermittent like traffic lights,” he said.

This member of the integrity commission said that the southern province of Basra is acting like an independent country and the central government has no authority there.

“There’s a completely different government in Basra that runs everything and this is with the testimony of the Basra MPs themselves,” he said. “That’s why the level of poverty and lack of services in Basra is high even though the amount of oil extracted in Basra is tens of times higher than it is in Kirkuk.”