ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s Prime Minister vowed to punish corrupt people who are in high governmental positions, and not only focus on small corruption cases.
While visiting the Iraqi interior ministry on Monday and meeting several officials of the ministry, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said that his government will not be busy with small corruption cases, but rather try to punish corruption on a bigger scale.
“This government will not be busy with small corrupt people, it does not mean we leave them, there are regulations and legal cases will continue,” Sudani said, adding that it is the major corrupt officials that the government needs to adopt a stance against.
“This is an official that makes decision, has major responsibilities, and is responsible for a large number of employees, they are tasked by the government to look at this case, if they get out of line and get corrupt, the matter is not only about me dismissing them,” Sudani added. “They will be punished in a way that goes with the size of their responsibility that they have neglected.”
Iraq is ranked as one of the world’s top ten most corrupt countries, according to a report by Transparency International published in January. The Berlin-based NGO ranked the perceived levels of corruption in Iraq as equal to the levels of abuse of power for private gain in Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and Honduras.
In the government’s latest move last week, the interior minister decided to sack the director of Basra’s drug control directorate “due to his failure to perform the duties and tasks entrusted to him.”
Rampant corruption plagues all levels of the Iraqi state, and official figures published last year estimated that well over 400 billion dollars has gone missing from state coffers since former dictator Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown in 2003.
The crisis-hit country ranks 157 out of 180 countries in Transparency International's corruption perceptions index.
Iraqis took to the streets in massive countrywide protests in October 2019 over widespread dissatisfaction with the country's politicians and rife corruption. The protests led to the resignation of then-prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi and early elections two years later.
Among the first decisions of Sudani’s cabinet when he assumed office was the formation of a high commission to investigate major corruption cases.
The decision came after Iraqi authorities announced that it was investigating the “theft” of $2.5 billion from the tax authority.
Iraq’s integrity commission in June said that nearly $697 million had went missing in the country due to “forgery, embezzlement, manipulation, money laundering (and) abuse of position”, with AFP citing an official who claimed that investigations into such cases had started as early as 2019.
