Six layers of corruption

The first loss occurs before the oil is sold. Oil passes through pipelines, storage tanks, refineries and berths. At each point where it is handed over, a smaller quantity than the real one can be recorded. A person who controls a meter or a loading point can record less oil than was moved and sell the difference.

Three methods recur in the documented record. The first is tapping pipelines to draw off diesel and fuel oil for the black market or for smuggling across the border. The second is metering: export meters were installed at the Basra oil terminal from July 2008 and at Khor al-Amaya from January 2011, but the gap remained at the wells, the storage tanks and the refineries. The third and largest is the trade in subsidised fuel oil, bought at a low domestic price, blended and re-exported as a commercial cargo.

The largest figure in this layer is not counted as theft. From 2014 to 2025, crude from the Kurdistan Region worth between $71 billion and $97 billion was sold outside the federal treasury. These sales were the subject of a legal dispute, which was settled by a ruling of the Federal Supreme Court in 2022 and by an international arbitration award in 2023. We show this figure on a separate line and never add it to the loss.

Iraqi oil is sold for dollars, and the buyers pay into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Iraq did not design this arrangement: UN Security Council Resolution 1483 of 2003 created the Development Fund for Iraq and placed oil revenue under the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The occupation years produced the clearest documented losses: Iraqi money disbursed without adequate controls, and cash flown into Baghdad on pallets. After 2011 the account passed to the Finance Ministry. Oil revenue is paid into it. The dollars that the ministry sells to the Central Bank, and the dollars that it spends directly, are paid out of it.

The audited statements show where most of that money went: state imports, debt and compensation to Kuwait. The gaps lie in what was never recorded or reconciled, and in the lack of any published audit of the account since 2019.

Every working day the Central Bank sells dollars to banks and exchange companies at a price it sets itself, and the market price is usually higher. Whoever receives dollars at the official price holds, at that moment, something worth more than was paid for it. Selling the dollars on the market is enough to realise the difference.

What matters, therefore, is access to the window. A bank can ask for dollars only for a stated purpose, such as an import invoice or a letter of credit. These documents are the weak point. An invoice can be inflated or used twice, and goods may never be shipped. The Central Bank's own record shows the banks it barred and the requests it refused. The reasons its committee wrote down include duplicate invoices, the same customer at more than one bank and customers in breach of anti-money-laundering rules. What the Central Bank refused.

This is the only layer that can be measured from the state's own records, day by day and bank by bank, and this encyclopedia measures it in that way.

Once oil dollars are sold to the Central Bank and turned into dinars, the money enters a budget for which the parties compete. Ministries are shared out among the parties according to their weight in parliament. Each ministry brings with it a payroll, a procurement budget, a licensing office and a number of subordinate agencies.

The simplest form is the payroll, where a name draws a salary and does no work. The largest is the contract. The reports of the Federal Board of Supreme Audit and the court cases recorded on this site describe projects that were paid for and not finished, or finished below the agreed standard. This layer also includes money drawn out of state accounts, as in the tax-deposit case, which Iraqi officials and the press call the "theft of the century".

Many of the numbers in this layer are officials' estimates, not measurements, and we show them as such, with the evidence tier of each. The cases that reached a court are documented with the names of those involved and their legal status.

Iraqis know this layer from daily life. It includes bribes paid at hospitals and at border posts. The sums are small compared with the layers above, but this is the only layer that people meet directly.

We place it at the end of the money's path because it is the layer citizens meet in person. The survey cited beside this text measured how common it is.

The sixth layer does not pass through the dollar. It is the transfer of state land, factories and concessions into private ownership through investment licences. The state grants land or a concession to an investor on terms set by the investment law. The investor then builds and sells, or operates the asset, and keeps the return.

It runs through three government windows: the National Investment Commission and the provincial investment commissions, the Supreme Council for Investment and Development, and the Ministry of Industry and Minerals with its industrial development directorate. For each window we document how it works, who received licences and what the watchdogs found. A licence listed in the register records a licence. It is not an allegation against its holder.