ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) delegation in Baghdad has given all data regarding the region’s oil and non-oil revenues to the federal government as part of ongoing budget talks, the KRG said on Wednesday.
The KRG delegation, led by Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani, met with the Iraqi parliament’s deputy speaker Hassan Kaabi on Wednesday to discuss relations between Erbil and Baghdad, as well as the 2021 budget bill.
The meeting was also attended by deputy speaker of the parliament Basheer Haddad, and the heads of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the Iraqi parliament.
The speaker recognized the KRG's efforts in presenting "all the necessary and relevant information regarding the region’s budget, revenues and expenditures in a transparent manner,” Talabani’s spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The budget bill is related to the nation’s welfare and we have to try our best to provide a just budget distribution to all the cities in the country,” read a statement from Kaabi on Wednesday, who called all sides to avoid “differences and political conflict” in the budget discussions.
Talabani arrived in Baghdad on Monday to lead a delegation meeting with the Iraqi parliament regarding Erbil’s share of the federal budget, which has been a long-standing point of contention between the two governments.
On December 22, Talabani announced Erbil and Baghdad had reached a deal on Iraq’s Federal Budget Bill for 2021 after months of disagreements. As a result of budget disputes and low oil prices, the Region’s civil servants went unpaid for most of 2020 – prompting deadly protests across the Kurdistan Region.
The deal “keeps the common interest of all Iraqi people, including the people of Kurdistan Region,” Talabani said at the time.
The 2021 budget bill was approved by Iraq’s Council of Ministers on December 21. Parliament has met twice to discuss the bill.
On January 23, more than 100 Iraqi MPs, mostly Shiite, signed a letter asking that the 2021 budget bill obliges the Kurdistan Region to hand over all its oil to the State Organization of Marketing of Oil (SOMO) in exchange for federal funds, potentially complicating matters with Erbil.
Baghdad failed to pass a budget in 2020 because of political turmoil, record low oil prices, and the coronavirus pandemic. In November, Iraqi lawmakers passed the Fiscal Deficit Coverage Bill approving loans to cover civil servant salaries for the last two months of the year.
The bill passed with a majority vote, despite a walkout staged by Kurdish MPs, angered that Erbil is obliged to hand over an unspecified amount of oil in exchange for funds – a clause they said was not in the original bill.
This article was updated at 20:15 to reflect the KRG's English-language statement
