If you were born in 2003

From 2004 to 2025 Iraq's federal government sold oil worth $1,470 billion, not counting the Kurdistan Region's own sales. The oil, year by year.

Not all of it became money. $151 billion of it was handed to foreign oil companies as crude oil, as their fee for working the oil fields.

Buyers paid $1,278 billion into Iraq's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Out of that money, $34.4 billion went to Kuwait as compensation for the 1990 invasion.

About $349 billion of the cash was not sold to the Central Bank. It covers state imports, debt payments, the compensation to Kuwait, occupation-era contracts and changes in the account's balance. About $35 billion of it is not itemised in any published record. Follow the money step by step.

The ministry sold most of its dollars to the Central Bank for dinars, to pay salaries: about $949 billion from 2003 to August 2026. Over the same years the Central Bank sold $932 billion to banks and exchange companies, day after day, at its own price. The daily sale.

The Central Bank's price was lower than the market's, so anyone who got dollars at its price could sell them for more. Since 2003 that gap was worth about $47 billion. This is not a finding that any particular bank or person made that money. It is the value of the gap, which went to whoever got the dollars. How we calculated it.

We rebuilt the Central Bank's own daily records: $170 billion went to 68 named banks, mostly from 2013 to mid-2017, the years whose records survive. From 2013 to early 2015 the bank's own committee turned down $24.6 billion of requests. The most common reasons by amount were: "Held back for audit", "Missing or faulty documents" and "Penalty on, or suspension of, the bank". Other reasons included duplicate invoice numbers and the same customer at more than one bank. On 25 March 2013 alone, banks asked for $253.9 million and 38% was refused. The ledger, bank by bank.

From 2008 to 2013, the dollars sent abroad to pay for private imports came to about $67 billion more than all the goods the rest of the world recorded selling to Iraq, once the state's own imports are taken out.

The Central Bank removed its daily sale results from 2017 onwards from its website. The copy of the 2013 minutes that remains online is of low resolution, and many figures in it cannot be read. No audit of the New York account has been published since 2019. Since 2023 the bank has sent $185 billion to banks' accounts abroad outside its daily sale without saying which banks received it. What the Central Bank withholds.

Public land and state factories also pass into private ownership through investment licences. The investment commissions, the Supreme Council for Investment and Development and the Ministry of Industry grant them. The site lists these licences one by one, with what the audit bodies found about each. A licence listed here records a licence. It is not an allegation against its holder. State land and investment licences.

We have gathered 98 corruption cases since 2003. Of the people and companies named on this site, 14 have been convicted, and 44 more are reported convicted, which means that we have not seen the judgment itself. 21 are under United States sanctions. A sanctions designation is an official act, not a court judgment. Of those under sanctions, 3 are also reported convicted. Every name on the site is given with its documented legal status and its documents. People and companies · Registers.

Every number on this site gives its source. Most come from official documents: the Central Bank's bulletins, the reports of the Federal Board of Supreme Audit, court rulings and audited accounts. Where a number is our own calculation, an estimate or a press report, the page says so. Every document is listed with its original address, its archived copy and a digital fingerprint that lets you check a copy has not been altered. How we work · The Record.