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Iraqi Kurdistan budget passes, eight months late, against
strong opposition |
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Iraqi Kurdistan budget passes, eight
months late, against strong opposition
13.7.2012
By Sangar Jamal, Sulaimaniyah - Niqash |
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Iraq's Kurdistan parliament.
July 13, 2012
SULAIMANIYAH, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', —
Despite protests and questions posed by opposition
politicians, the leadership in Iraqi Kurdistan
passed the 2012 budget anyway. Critics say the
budget is ridiculously late, in the red and does not
show where millions are bound.
After eight months’ delay and ten days of furious
debate in local government, the semi-autonomous
region of Kurdistan passed its 2012 budget at the
end of last month.
For 2012, the northern state’s budget totals around
US$12 billion. Most of that amount would be put
toward operating expenses with under a third going
toward investment.
At the first reading of the budget, many of the
Kurdish opposition parties were upset about it
because, they noted, it was not transparent enough.
Other issues included the fact that the revenues
expected from the oil industry and from customs and
duties payments were not clear; they also objected
to the amount allocated for the regional leaderships
and the state’s security apparatus and intelligence
services.
A further issue was the budget deficit – presumed
expenditure is greater than expected income on the
state’s accounts. And finally there was the delay:
the authorities were always late in submitting the
budget for the local parliament’s approval. Usually
the delay was six months, this year it had been
eight months.
“There is always a delay in submitting the budget to
the Parliament,” Abdullah Mullah Nouri, an MP for
the opposition Change movement, complained to Niqash.
“This year, we received it eight months after we
were supposed to. So the financial year has shrunk
from 12 months to five, or maybe six. That doesn’t
happen anywhere but in [Iraqi] Kurdistan,” he says.
“And the most worrying thing for us is that the same
problems are repeated every year.”
In terms of the region’s revenue, the opposition
parties say that the figures don’t add up. The
estimated income is less than previous years’ and as
Nouri, who is a member of the local committee on oil
and gas, says, “if we take into consideration oil
revenues and the amount of trade between the region
and its neighbours – this goes up to IQD30 billion
[around US$25 million] – we think that the revenues
should be much higher than those stated in the
budget submitted to us.”
Nouri also pointed out that final accounts were
never submitted to Parliament and that the local
government appeared to have no numbers for the
amount of unemployed in the region, the number of
tourists visiting and other important statistics.
Opposition politicians were not the only one
expressing concern about this year’s budget. A group
of locals, including some civil society activists,
formed the “Popular Committee for Defence of the
Budget” and promptly consulted local analysts and
economists in order to come up with a list of points
they presented to the local government.
“The budget was not transparent and this was
actually acknowledged by officials in the regional
government as well as by the leaders of Parliament,”
Kamal Rauf,www.ekurd.net
head of the committee and also editor-in-chief of
Hawlati, the first independent newspaper in the
Kurdish region, says. “The committee asked the
government to clarify the budget. Much of the
region’s oil revenue and other revenues are being
wasted.”
In order to have any say about the state of the
budget, those who had questions about it really only
had one option: their chance would have come if the
region’s President had not signed immediately and
had sent it back to Parliament for further
discussion. However the President signed the budget
off without heeding the various critics’ calls for
further investigation.
This, political analysts say, could eventually cause
of further trouble in Iraqi Kurdistan and disrupt
the currently, relatively calm, relationship between
the electorate, the various opposition parties and
those in power.
Copyright ©, respective author or news agency,
niqash.org
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