Economic researcher, Ziad Al-Hashemi, said that the Central Bank of Iraq suddenly punished 49 Iraqi companies on charges mostly related to smuggling and money laundering through foreign transfers, despite all previous assurances that transfers have become immune to smuggling.
Al-Hashemi considered in a post on the “X” platform, which was followed by “Al-Jarida”, that “this is a procedure that confirms that the Iraqi dollar smuggling system is still very active, and that the Central Bank Governor’s talk about the compliance rate reaching 95% is just rhetoric to beautify the bleak image of the Iraqi banking system.”
He explained that “the 49 companies that were punished are companies operating in various commercial, industrial and service sectors, and this confirms that we are facing a dangerous, broad system that has penetrated the entity of the Iraqi economy and market like cancer!”
He pointed out that “the banking system in Iraq is still heavily penetrated by smuggling and money laundering systems and support for sanctioned entities, and after all these years and promises, it has become not unlikely that there is real collusion and collaboration between the official Iraqi banking system and those smuggling systems.”
He continued, “On the other hand, we are waiting for the Syrian documents that will arrive that reveal the size of the illegal trade and the movement of smuggling dollars from Iraq, which the Assad regime used to live on. Then we will learn the details of one of the most important unknown parts of the process of smuggling Iraqi money, which began draining Iraq in 2004 and continues to this day.”
