“Since the formation of the current government in late 2022, Iraq has intensified its efforts to combat corruption, serious crime, and money laundering, with the aim of building a diversified and sustainable economy,” Auke Lootsma, the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) special representative in Iraq, told the state-owned al-Sabah newspaper.
Rampant corruption plagues all levels of the Iraqi state. Official figures published in 2022 estimated that well over 400 billion dollars have gone missing from state coffers since former dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled in 2003.
In a speech at the UN General Assembly last year, Sudani said that combatting corruption has been his cabinet’s foremost priority.
Lootsma said that Iraq has “conducted hundreds of investigations and trials into major corruption cases” since Sudani took over, including the cabinet’s efforts to uncover a major tax fraud case.
The country remains riddled by the twists and turns of a massive theft of $2.5 billion from the country’s tax coffers, dubbed the “Heist of the Century.”
An investigation by the Iraqi finance ministry in October 2022 concluded that over $2.5 billion (3.7 trillion dinars) in tax funds were stolen from a bank by five companies during the tenure of former Finance Minister Ali Allawi.
Iraq is ranked 154th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index for 2023, improving three spots from the previous year.
