Oct. 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Iraqi government announced this Sunday the beginning of an immediate investigation to find out the whereabouts of 2,500 million euros stolen from a bank fund of the General Tax Authority of Iraq, in one of the biggest scandals recorded in the recent history of the country.
The theft was announced on Saturday by the Minister for Oil, Ihsan Abdul Jabbar, and confirmed today by Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al Sudani.
Abdul Jabbar explained that an investigation by the Ministry of Finance, a portfolio he directed until his resignation this week, had revealed that “a specific group”, without giving details, had taken over 3.7 billion (with ‘b’) Iraqi dinars , about 2,500 million euros, in a fund of the national tax authority in the Rafidain bank.
El Rafidain, the largest bank in Iraq, with 165 branches inside Iraq and offices in Cairo, Beirut, or Abu Dhabi, has assured that it has nothing to do with the theft of this amount, collected between September 2021 and August of 2022.
“The bank’s task was limited to disbursing the bonds of the General Tax Authority of its branches after verifying the validity of their issuance,” the bank assured in a note collected by the official Iraqi news agency INA.
Prime Minister Al Sudani has assured on social networks that the resolution of this scandal has acquired a “priority” character.
“We will not hesitate to adopt measures to curb corruption, which has brazenly spread throughout the articulations of the State and its institutions,” he warned in relation to the long history of corruption that plagues a country that ranks 157th out of the 180 listed in the International Transparency Index.