Plus
*Ex-Iraq corruption watchdog blames firing on oil smuggling investigation
*Police bust smugglers in Missan
*2008 budget delayed a week
*Dana Gas to pump $300M into Iraqi Kurdistan natural gas venture
*Corruption allegation over Iraq Central Bank building fire
*Iraq Press Roundup
*Much, much more…
New data from Iraq’s oil export arm finds increased production and high prices raised revenues by 31 percent to $39.8 billion in 2007, compared with 2006, United Press International reports. Improved output and security of the northern infrastructure helped Iraqi exports increase by 9.2 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to a revenues and quantities report from the Iraq State Oil Marketing Organization obtained by UPI.
Iraq’s former top corruption watchdog says he was fired for outing political connections to the still booming racket of oil smuggling, UPI reports. “I was fired after I uncovered the names of oil smugglers,” said Moussa Faraj, the former chief of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, the Dar al-Salam newspaper reports.
Police in Iraq’s Missan province have broken two smuggling operations, one moving oil products and the other medical supplies, UPI reports.The busts took place at a checkpoint north of Amara, the capital of Missan in Iraq’s south.
Iraq’s estimated $48 billion budget for 2008 has been delayed for another week, the Voices of Iraq news agency reports. The hitch is disputes over what the Kurdistan Regional Government is due, and whether the Kurdish militia should come from its allocation or a special fund. A sizeable chunk of the budget will be for capital investment, billions for the Ministries of Oil and Electricity, but there are serious questions as to the government’s capacity to spend the money, and the U.S. government’s ability to account for it. Also delayed, speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said, is a new law on provinces.
Iraq has a large surplus, thanks to high oil prices and the inability of ministries to spend their annual budget, and the former minister of planning is warning of rash and inappropriate ways to spend it, VOI reports. “Iraq has a cash reserve of more than $20 billion, which has boosted the value of the Iraqi dinar and its purchasing power, in addition to a large credit of over $10 billion by the Iraqi Development Fund,” said Mahdi al-Hafiz.
Dana Gas will pump $300 million into its Iraqi Kurdistan venture, Reuters reports, with natural gas flowing by July and becoming the cash crop for the company, which has Egyptian projects and is eyeing Algeria.
Parliamentarians are now demanding an official inquiry into the suspected arson of the Iraq Central Bank building in Baghdad, Kareem Zair reports for Azzaman. Representatives from a number of the political blocks in Parliament, who allege the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs was also torched, say it was a purposeful attempt to burn documents proving corruption.
The decrease in violence in Iraq is no trend, but a phenomenon, threatened by a recent increase in attacks, targeted killings and bombings, military columnist Joseph L. Galloway writes for McClatchy Newspapers. Now there’s a new form of inter and intra-sectarian killing. And it poses a new threat.
What the “surge” has facilitated instead is the total balkanization of Baghdad – as well as the whole of Iraq, Pepe Escobar writes in Asia Times online. There are now at least 5 million Iraqis among refugees and the internally displaced - apart from competing statistics numbering what certainly amounts to hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. So of course there is less violence; there’s hardly any people left to be ethnically cleansed.
As ExxonMobil prepares to celebrate what could be a record profit of more than $10 billion for the last quarter of 2007, jubilant company officials and stockholders might want to join in a moment of silence for the more than 1 million war dead in Iraq — Iraqi and American combined. They paid the ultimate price in a war in which ExxonMobil has had a hand and which we can estimate is responsible for at least $2.5 billion of ExxonMobil’s latest profit, Nick Mottern of ConsumersforPeace.org writes in a UPI op-ed. He says oil companies also pushed for the war and were involved in early planning and urging of the draft oil law.
The Iraq Press Roundup, a review of Iraq’s editorial pages, by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.
Rebuilding failures by one of the most heavily criticized companies working in Iraq, the American construction giant Parsons, were much more widespread than previously disclosed and touched on nearly every aspect of the company’s operation in the country, according to a report released Monday by a federal oversight agency, James Glanz reports for The New York Times.
—
