How we work

• The Central Bank of Iraq: its daily bulletins on the dollar sale, its result pages, the minutes of the window committee, its monthly and annual statistical bulletins, its audited accounts and its lists of barred banks. Many of these were deleted from its website. We recovered them from its files page (cbi.iq/page/21) and from the Internet Archive.
• The Ministry of Oil and SOMO, Iraq's Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and the audited statements of the New York account (KPMG, EY).
• The Federal Board of Supreme Audit, the Federal Integrity Commission, parliament and Iraqi courts.
• The US Treasury (OFAC and FinCEN), the US State Department, the US Justice Department, US and UK courts, the United Nations, the IMF, Iraq's Central Statistical Organization, and the trade records of Iraq's partners.
• The Iraqi, Arab and international press. Each report is attributed to its publisher, and no report is used on its own as the basis of a finding about anyone.

Central Bank sales. We use the official totals the bank publishes in its statistical bulletins: $932.3 billion from October 2003 to August 2026, with the last year provisional. The daily sale.

The bank-by-bank ledger. We read each of the bank's daily tables and run two checks on it. The first checks that each bank's cash and transfers add up to the total the bank wrote for it. The second checks that the banks together add up to the total the bank published for that day. We ran these checks on 985 days, and 461 matched to the dollar. Rows that fail stay on the page but are not credited to any bank, and no bank is credited with a purchase dated before its licence or after its ban. Every figure in the ledger is therefore a minimum. The Ledger.

The price gap. For each month we multiply sales by the difference between the official market price and the price paid to the bank, and divide the result by the market price. The details.

The oil money. We follow every dollar from the value of exports to the New York account and on to the Central Bank. For the years from 2003 to 2019 we use the audited statements. For the years from 2020 to 2025, whose audited statements were never published, we use published substitutes (the balance of payments, which is the record of money entering and leaving the country). We describe money that no record explains as "not itemised in any published record", not as "stolen". Follow the money.

Oil before export. We give a range, from low to high, with a central estimate. We show the Kurdistan Region's crude sold outside the federal treasury separately, because it is the subject of a legal dispute, not theft. Layer one.

Every name carries its documented legal status on the date of writing. We call no one a criminal or corrupt unless a court has convicted them. We attribute every accusation to its source, and we treat a sanctions designation as an official act, not a court judgment. Anyone with no charge, conviction, sanction or official finding is described as "Not charged as of the date of writing". In Arabic, statuses are worded so that they do not assume a person's gender unless the source states it.

• Who bought the dollars before 2012 and after July 2020. The Central Bank did not publish the names of the banks for those periods, or it deleted them.
• Who received the dollars sent abroad outside the daily sale since 2023.
• The audited statements of the New York account for 2020 to 2025.
• The licence lists of the other provincial investment commissions, and the state land they granted.
• The directors-general and deputy ministers, the leaders of parties and armed groups who are not under US sanctions, and the UK and EU sanctions.
• We have not yet obtained everything that the Integrity Commission and several other Iraqi official bodies publish.

Every table on the site can be downloaded, with a sheet explaining each column. Data downloads. If you find a mistake, please write to us. We will correct it and give the date of the correction. About, corrections and replies.