The Mother of all Corruption
Al Jazeera and other news sources (Not USMSM) report that:
Iraq's former trade minister who resigned last week amid a corruption scandal, has been arrested at Baghdad airport while trying to flee the country, a senior Iraqi official has said. The former trade minister’s two brothers are also accused of misappropriating millions of dollars related to imports. One is currently in police custody and the other's whereabouts are unknown.
The scandal first erupted in April when police, entering the Trade Ministry in Baghdad to arrest 10 senior officials accused of corruption and embezzlement, were greeted with gunfire by the ministry's own guards. The shoot-out allowed several officials, including two brothers of the Trade Minister, Abdul Falah al-Sudany, time to escape out the back gate.
Officials at the ministry, which spends billions of dollars buying rice, sugar, flour and other items, are notorious for delivering food rations that are unfit for human consumption, after they charge the state full price. Why it matters after the jump.
A recently leaked Report by Iraq's anti-corruption committee, said billions of dollars were being lost because of corruption, with the worst offenders being the ministries of interior, finance, health, defense and education. The US State Dept. agrees that conditions in Iraq throughout 2008 included, "widespread, severe corruption at all levels of government" which has cost the loss of $18 Billion in US aid. International opinion is no different. Iraq is deemed the third most corrupt country in the world after Burma and Somalia, out of 180 countries, according to the corruption index compiled by Transparency International. It's soooo bad that the last anti-corruption boss in Iraq was forced to flee the country.
In 2008, a deadly outbreak of cholera in Iraq is blamed on a scandal involving corrupt officials who failed to sterilize the local drinking water because they were bribed to buy long expired chlorine from Iran. But we didn't hear too much about this, except the body counts because, under Bush, Iraqi corruption was CLASSIFIED!!! Institutionalized corruption is obvious, even to the US MSM:
In 2008 only 300 officials were charged with corruption, and out of those 87 were found guilty. All were low-level officers. No high-level officials have ever had to go to court. That’s largely because of Article 136, a hold over from the Saddam period that allows ministers to stop any case from going to trial.
Fighting corruption in Iraq is not only difficult, it's deadly. Last month, one of the members of the anti-corruption committee was shot dead on the streets of Baghdad. The BBC has done man-on-the-street interviews:
"Is this what you call democracy? Government officials are getting rich off the back of our misery," one buyer in Shorja market said. "This would never have happened under Saddam," added another. "We may have had our problems, but we were not being robbed."
* Before the war, Baghdad had electricity between 16 and 24 hours a day. This has dropped to just under 12.
* There was no national mobile phone network, now there are at least 12 million subscribers.
* In April 2007 there were 261,000 internet subscribers. Before the war this number was estimated as 4,500.
* Of the 34,000 doctors registered in pre-war Iraq, 20,000 fled, 2,000 have been killed and 250 kidnapped.
* Registered cars more than doubled, to 3.1 million by October 2005.
Source: The Brookings Institution