Legislative corruption

“Corruption in Iraq is with intent not to show.” This phrase I have been repeating frequently in my writings since 2006. I have also talked a lot about what I call “legislative corruption”; It is the corruption that occurs within the framework of the law that the corrupt themselves legislate in order to establish the clientelist structure that governs the state, or in order to cover up their corruption, or at the very least, in order to provide an opportunity for this corruption!
After the adoption of the 2005 constitution, the legislative and executive institutions colluded in passing laws that legitimize corruption through their authority, and perhaps the most prominent example of this is the so-called social benefits! The federal budget laws allowed to grant members of the Presidency Council/President of the Republic and his two deputies, the Prime Minister and his deputies, the Speaker and his deputies, the right to improvise an amount of one million dollars per month, without any controls or subjection to real oversight or scrutiny!
And these “social benefits” were not canceled until 2012!
The legislative and executive authorities continued to frame corruption legally, by “designing” the federal budget laws so that every article and paragraph in it would serve the political forces/parties that transformed state institutions into mere fiefdoms for the leaders of those forces and parties; By subjecting the budget of ministries, agencies, or entities not linked to a ministry or governorate, to bargaining, deals and extortion; From the parliamentary committees concerned with the budget, to the moment of approving this budget! The funny thing here is that the follower of the approval of the legal articles, can easily know the entity or the investor who is behind this article, or that paragraph, by analyzing the articles of the budget law!
For example, a “person” put a paragraph of his own personally in the budget law for the year 2021, which is an article that provides a solution to a nation that one of his companies is going through, and it is certain that he could not have passed that article without agreement with the Legal Committee, and the Finance Committee (and he was its vice-chairman ), and an agreement with the Presidency of the House of Representatives, and finally with the deputies themselves who voted on that paragraph, complicity or ignorance!
Another attempt is recently being made to pass the point of major corruption, through a law currently being discussed in the Iraqi parliament, which has been called the “Emergency Support for Food Security and Development” law, with allocations of more than $24.1 billion! In order to pass it, the atmosphere was prepared by electing a special temporary financial committee to pass this law, and the majority of the members of this committee have nothing to do with a specialty called economics or finance!
is supposed to legislate laws, no one noticed that this law violates the internal system of the Council of Ministers No. 2 of 2019, which is determined in Article 42 / second, which stipulates that it is not within the authority of the government to manage daily affairs / Conducting business “proposing bills or contracting loans”!The Federal Financial Management Law No. 6 of 2019 stipulated in Article 13 that in the event of delay in approving the Federal Budget Law, the disbursement will be made at a rate of 1 to 12 or less of the total actual expenditures for the current expenditures of the previous fiscal year on a monthly basis, until the approval of the federal general budget , as well as the disbursement of the total annual allocations for the ongoing investment projects whose allocations are included during the previous and subsequent year according to the preparation and implementation accounts, which allows the government to conduct daily affairs to carry out its duties without any problem, and the evidence is that three months have passed without a federal budget for 2022 and there was no confusion!
The argument that the law “made up” and promoted by its main investors, is that this law is necessary for food security, development and poverty alleviation, with an inevitable focus, of course, on the current crisis in global markets as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war, especially with regard to wheat!
Simply the political actors behind this law want to convince us that after the failure of 17 federal budgets, and hundreds of billions of dollars, a complete failure to provide services, or to alleviate poverty, they will succeed today in achieving food security, through a temporary law until the approval of the general budget for the year 2022!
It is clear that the “urgency” in “tabbing” this flimsy law made them get involved in a real legal farce. Article 2/3 talked about financing the account designated for this law through “external and internal loans” with no more than 6.7 billion dollars. However, Article 3 / IV of the law talked about allocating 10% of the entire account, i.e., the amount of 2.41 billion dollars, to “pay off the external debt and the debts of importing gas and purchasing energy,” meaning that the law borrows an external debt to repay, with these loans, part of the external debt !
If there was a real need to secure food security for the Iraqi citizen because of the recent developments, and because of the delay in forming the Iraqi government, and thus the adoption of the Federal Budget Law for 2022, it would have been possible to go to the adoption of an exceptional law that would allow the Ministry of Finance to provide twice the amount that was allocated for importing basic materials that enter into The ration quota for the Iraqi citizen, and this amount would be more than enough not only to achieve food security, because international prices did not reach double their price, and will not reach it in any way, but to provide a strategic stockpile of these materials, and this amount will not exceed 2 billion dollars At most.
The “emergency support” law has exposed the ploy of the influential in immoral investment in the funds that were achieved recently due to the rise in oil prices in global markets, especially that the current political impasse with regard to the election of the President of the Republic and thus the formation of the government, and then the approval of the federal budget, may delay this Investing for an indefinite time, so it was necessary to circumvent this by using propaganda expressions such as food security, development and poverty alleviation!