MPs reveal reason for breaking quorum: Amending the budget law will cost the government $7.5 billion
MPs reveal reason for breaking quorum: Amending the budget law will cost the government $7.5 billion
2025-01-19
Representatives revealed the reason for breaking the legal quorum in the House of Representatives session Sunday, when presenting the voting paragraph on the draft amendment to General Budget Law No. 13 of 2023.
The Vice Chairman of the Investment Committee, Hussein Al-Saabari, said in a press conference, “The quorum was broken in Sundays session due to the paragraph amending Article 12 of the draft general budget law.”
He explained, “This article included fixing the price of a barrel of oil in the Kurdistan Region at $12, but today the amendment project aims to raise the cost to a ceiling of $16.”
He added, “If the price of $16 is multiplied by 400 thousand barrels per day, the annual output will be $2.5 billion, which means that the amendment will burden the government with a three-year budget burden of $7.5 billion, so the representatives rejected this amendment and we left the session,” indicating that “members of the House of Representatives are recording the names of those absent, which is unacceptable, because the representative who rejects any article or paragraph in the law has the right to leave the session and break the quorum.”
He continued, “We asked the Finance Committee, the Kurdish blocs, the Kurdistan Region, and the Ministries of Oil and Finance for a copy of the oil contract, but so far no executive or legislative body has seen the contract.”
He explained, “There are pressures from the parliament presidency and the blocs to push the representatives to pass the vote,” while ruling out at the same time passing the amendment bill in its current form without transparency and credibility.
burathanews.com
