On Saturday, the Parliamentary Economic Committee made it public that it had received information indicating that the General Tax Authority had raised taxes on citizens to make up for what it had lost as a result of the Deal of the Century.
MP Yasser Al-Husseini, the committee’s deputy head, said that the parliamentary economic committee will meet with the head of the Iraqi Tax Authority to learn more about raising the corporate and individual income tax rates.
Al-Husseini added that the board got data demonstrating that the duty increment would be utilized to make up for the cash the Power lost in the Arrangement of the 100 years.
He said that the Economic Committee is opening this file and that we will have an opinion and report on it after hosting the head of the Tax Authority in Parliament.
The “theft of the century” case, involving former senior officials and businessmen, was first revealed in October 2022. It sparked intense outrage in Iraq, which has seen numerous protests in recent years demanding an end to corruption.
The “theft of the century” became the topic of conversation on the Iraqi street, in political circles, and elsewhere before its echoes reached Arab and Western media outlets.
The “theft of the century” was the disappearance of 3.7 trillion Iraqi dinars (approximately two and a half billion dollars) from tax trust funds about two months before the end of the previous government led by Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. This was discovered by a number of concerned parties.
In the middle of July in 2024, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani thought that the “theft of the century,” the theft of tax deposits, was a bad moment in Iraqi history. He revealed that half of its funds were smuggled out of the country and that it was carried out under official cover.