Article 12 obstructs budget schedules and Parliament is unaware of the size of expenditures and deficit

Article 12 obstructs budget schedules and Parliament is unaware of the size of expenditures and deficit

2025-01-07 03:14

Article 12 obstructs budget schedules and Parliament is unaware of the size of expenditures and deficitShafaq News/ Member of the Parliamentary Finance Committee, Jamal Kojer, expected on Tuesday that the budget tables would be sent in February, while he pointed out the possibility of delaying its passage due to disagreements over Article 12.

Kocher said in a statement to Shafaq News, “The Iraqi law requires the Council of Ministers to send the state’s general budget to the House of Representatives in the ninth or tenth month of each year, but this has not happened in the past years.”

Koger expected that the budget tables for the year 2025 would be sent to the Council at the beginning of next February, but the disagreements over Article 12 of the budget law may delay sending the tables from the government to Parliament.

Koger added that “the House of Representatives and members of the Parliamentary Finance Committee do not have any knowledge of the details of the budget schedules for the year 2025,” noting that they do not “know the size of the budget in terms of operating and investment expenses and the deficit rate so far.”

Article 12 of the draft budget law includes compensation for the Kurdistan Regional Government for the costs of production and transportation of oil extraction in the region.

It is noteworthy that the representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party bloc, Jiay Timur, confirmed earlier to Shafaq News Agency, that “the Iraqi government previously calculated in the budget law the cost of extracting oil at $6, and this is a very small number,” noting that “foreign companies that work on extracting oil at a cost of up to $26 per barrel.”

In June 2023, the Iraqi Parliament voted on the draft general budget law for the fiscal years (2023, 2024, 2025).

shafaq.com