[size=30]London report: The Sudanese government begins to settle political scores with the Al-Kazemi government
[ltr]2023.03.05 - 08:31[/ltr]
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[ltr]2023.03.05 - 08:31[/ltr]
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Baghdad - people
The investigations into what became known as the "theft of the century" took a clear political turn, when the Iraqi judicial authorities investigating the case issued orders to arrest officials in the government of former Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, according to a report by the London-based Al-Arab newspaper.
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Observers say, according to the newspaper's report, which was followed by "NAS" (March 5, 2023), that "drawing charges against these officials, before arresting those responsible for the five companies that managed the theft operations, is a turning point in settling political scores with the government of Mustafa Al-Kazemi."
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Following is the text of the report:
The prevailing conviction in the Iraqi street states that government officials, leaders of armed factions, or parliamentarians are behind all thefts of public funds. However, reaching them remained close to impossible given the influence they still enjoyed.
In one of his most recent statements, Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani acknowledged the existence of a class of officials and employees in the country that are protected by political forces. However, he emphasized at the same time that his government had no red lines to pursue corruption.
And a document from the General Tax Authority revealed last October that $2.5 billion was paid between September 2021 and August 2022 through 247 checks disbursed by those companies. The funds were then withdrawn in cash from the accounts of these companies, whose owners are subject to arrest warrants, but only one official of them was arrested. He was released after promising to return his share of the stolen money. Although his release was a legal violation, given that acknowledging the crime does not cancel the penalty for it, Al-Sudani justified this by saying that he wanted to recover the looted money, and that there was no point in arresting a few people if that money was not returned to the state treasury.
So far, the Sudanese government has not succeeded in arresting the direct officials of those companies. It is believed that their confessions constitute a cornerstone of the investigations, as to whether the four officials in the Al-Kazemi government had actually participated in planning or benefiting from the crime, and whether there were others involved, especially since the initial investigations indicated that the operation was orchestrated from a wide network. Officials, civil servants and businessmen.
"It was a very organized and well-planned robbery," said Jamal al-Asadi, an Iraqi legal expert and retired judge familiar with corruption cases. The operation was carried out by withdrawing money from the accounts of the General Tax Authority in the Rafidain Bank, which includes deposits of companies that were supposed to be returned to them once taxes were deducted.
After the resignation of Finance Minister Ali Allawi, the acting Minister of Finance at the time, Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar, who also held the position of Minister of Oil, conducted an audit of these accounts and discovered the theft after receiving complaints from an oil company that was unable to recover its tax deposits. When the minister inquired about the remaining balance in the account, the tax authority said it had $2.5 billion, but further scrutiny revealed that the actual balance had fallen to only $100 million.
Allawi had requested that his office approve any large withdrawals, but senior tax authority managers ignored the request. He resigned in August "in protest of corruption and foreign interference in Iraqi affairs".
Investigations indicated that, weeks before the first checks were paid, the authorities removed a major part of the censorship, claiming that companies had complained about long waiting times. The Federal Financial Supervision Bureau was removed from the process of monitoring withdrawals at the request of Representative Haitham Al-Jubouri, who was then heading the Parliamentary Finance Committee.
The audit found that the companies, three of which had been set up just weeks before payments were to be made, had submitted fraudulent documents in order to be able to claim payments. The auditors were unable to follow up on the money because it was withdrawn in cash and loaded into huge trucks, given that the amounts amount to about 3.7 trillion dinars.
There is justification for believing that Iran was the final destination for these funds, and that they are directly linked to the daily disbursement operations organized by the Central Bank of Iraq. The Iraqi dinars obtained by Iran are converted into dollars that are eventually smuggled into it.
Neither the government nor the judicial authorities provided a detailed disclosure of the accusations against the four former officials in the Al-Kadhimi government, nor was the broader circle involved in carrying out the theft revealed.
It is known that this process is not the largest in the history of governments established after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi revealed that 400 billion dollars of government records were “lost” during the reign of Nuri al-Maliki’s government, and a number of major The other thefts, which involved hundreds of millions of dollars, have yet to be detected or prosecuted.
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