What the Central Bank withholds
Since 2003 the Central Bank of Iraq has sold $932 billion of the country's dollars. This page lists the records that it no longer shows the public, or never showed. For each one we state what is missing and where it was last seen. We make no claim about the bank's intent.
Who bought the dollars
From 2013 to July 2020 the Central Bank published, day by day, how many dollars each bank bought. For the period from 2013 to early 2015 it also published its committee's minutes, which list the requests it turned down and the reasons.
We have recovered most of the daily record from 2013 to mid-2017, and scattered days after that (the share we can name falls to 0.3% in 2018, 22.3% in 2019 and 0.4% in 2020). The last bulletin we have found that names the banks is dated 28 July 2020. Since then the daily bulletins give only the total and the number of banks. No record of purchases by each bank has been found for the years from 2003 to 2011. The record as we recovered it.
The pages it deleted
The Central Bank's website had a results page for every day it sold dollars. The pages for 2017 onwards have been deleted, and their addresses now open the home page. 761 of them survive only because the Internet Archive happened to save them. The rest are lost. The recovered pages.
The low-resolution copy it left online
The 2013 minutes still on the Central Bank's website are a low-resolution copy (about 72 dots per inch). The original it published in 2014 was sharp (300 dots per inch) and survives only in the Internet Archive. In the low-resolution copy many figures cannot be read. The original allowed us to check 174 days against the bank's own daily totals, to the dollar.
Dollars sent outside the daily sale: $185 billion
Since 2023 the Central Bank has also sent dollars straight to banks' accounts abroad, outside its daily sale: $22.6 billion in 2023, $55.1 billion in 2024, $73.9 billion in 2025 and $33.5 billion in 2026 (January to August). It has never said which banks received them.
Its own audited accounts
The Central Bank's audited accounts for the 10 years from 2016 to 2025 say nothing about the daily dollar sale. They do not state how much it sold or to whom, and they say nothing about the dollars sent abroad outside the sale. They say that it buys dollars from the Finance Ministry, but they give no amounts.
The oil money in New York after 2019
Iraq's oil money is paid into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Its audited statements were published every year from 2003 to 2019. An audit for 2020 was commissioned. The audit committee's minutes of 7 December 2020 give the work to Ernst & Young for $90,000, limited to the financial statements because of COVID. We have not found any published audited statement for the years from 2020 to 2025. Follow the money.