Jalal Talabani and Dr Barham Salih in $12 million scandal

Comment by Kamal Chomani:

Former prime minister, Dr Barham Ahmed Salih secretly allocated 1,000,000,000 ID (858,005 USD) a month from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) budget to fund the office of Iraq President Jalal Talabani, Hawlati newspaper reported yesterday.

According to a secret document published by Hawlati, Dr Barham Salih was asked to do this on January 15, 2011 by the Ministry of Finance followed by another official letter from the General Secretary Office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) on January 18, 2011.

The Ministry of Finance and Economy was then ordered to release the money based on official demands by Dr Salih and letters from the PUK.

It was agreed to send a monthly sum of 1,000,000,000 ID to President Jalal Talabani’s office. The secret document, labelled ‘No: 17, Date: January 20, 2011’, bears the signature of Bayiz Talabani, Minister of Finance and Economy.

Since January 18, 2011 the money has been spent by President Talabani’s Presidential Office in Baghdad. So it is now for 15 months that these funds have gone to Talabani’s office. Mathematically, 1,000,000,000 ID for 15 months becomes 15,000,000,000 ID which exceeds 12 million USD.

This is very obvious, serious corruption for these reasons:

President Talabani already has a special monthly sovereignty budget which is regulated by the Iraqi parliament. He is supposed to use this budget to overcome the financial problems of his office and any related works to his office.
The KRG’s budget is a special budget for the people of Kurdistan only. It must be spent for the benefit of the people and not for any other reason. Talabani has no right to use even a single Iraqi Dinar of the KRG’s budget.
The PUK’s intervention in the government’s regulations is violating the law and should not be accepted in any way. We have been criticizing the two ruling parties’ interference in government for a long time. This revelation shows that it is still the politburos that govern our region and not a national executive power called the Government. Hundreds of crises plague the KRG due to the intervention of the two ruling parties in all state institutions.
This shows that Talabani is not intelligent enough to make good use of the sovereignty budget that the Iraq parliament has given his office. If he cannot regulate an office, how can he end corruption in Iraq – one of the most corrupt countries in the world?
We Kurds have hundreds of problems with the KRG. Whenever we ask for more public services and more employment for youths and graduated students, the KRG glibly tells us that it doesn’t have enough money for this.

The General Prosecutor should investigate this case. This is not a small amount of money which people can tolerate. Recently, a child died from the cold due to the family having no fuel in their house: and yet such huge sums can go to Talabani without justification.

Talabani should be asked to explain how he has used this money. We all know that Talabani has since 2003 worked mainly for Iraq, not Kurdistan. It must therefore not be tolerated if his supporters claim that he has used the money for the benefit of Kurdish politics.

One more very important point is that Dr Barham should be asked to attend a Kurdistan parliament session in which he must be questioned about this matter. The opposition should immediately work hard on this case.

My previous article was also about Talabani but I hope readers everywhere can appreciate how serious this corruption is.

I have no more words except to say that this is an outright scandal involving Talabani and Barham Salih. I am left wondering how many more secret deals are hidden in the KRG’s offices!