Iraq premier quietly firing fraud monitors

The government of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki is systematically dismissing Iraqi oversight officials, who were installed to fight corruption in Iraqi ministries by order of the American occupation administration, which had hoped to bring Western standards of accountability to the notoriously opaque and graft-ridden bureaucracy here. The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, have come as estimates of official Iraqi corruption have soared. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials. The moves have not been publicly announced by Mr. Maliki's government, but word of them has begun to circulate through the layers of Iraqi bureaucracy as Parliament prepares to vote on a long-awaited security agreement. That pact sets the terms for continued American presence here after the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31, but also amounts to a framework for a steady reduction in that presence. Such a change will undoubtedly lessen American oversight of Iraqi institutions. While some Iraqi officials defended the dismissals, saying there had been no political motivation, others pointed to the secrecy involved as supporting their view that those removed had lost their posts without good cause. Each of Iraq's 30 cabinet-level ministries has one inspector general. These oversight officials are supported by varying budgets and staffing. Although some of the inspectors general have been notably quiet, others have vigorously investigated both current and former ministers and other senior officials, and the top echelons of Iraqi officialdom have found ample reason to fear them. In one case, investigations of a former electricity minister landed him in jail before he escaped and fled to the United States, and an Oil Ministry inspector general detailed extensive smuggling and extortion schemes that he said bedeviled the industry. A former public works minister, a Kurd, complained before she fled the country that her ministry's inspector general at the time, a Shiite, had been hyperactive and had brought charges based more on political considerations than actual wrongdoing. How many of the ministries have received orders to dismiss their inspectors is a matter of disagreement among Iraqi governmental officials, but their estimates range from a handful to as many as 17. Several senior Iraqi and American officials agreed that seven to nine inspectors general had already been dismissed or forced into retirement. In one case, at the Education Ministry, the post became vacant when the inspector general died. Senior Iraqi officials and four of the dismissed officials, many of whom asked not to be named for fear of government reprisals, said inspectors had already been removed in the Ministries of Water Resources, Culture, Trade, and Youth and Sport. In addition, inspectors have been removed from the cabinet-level Central Bank of Iraq, and from two religious offices, the Sunni Endowment and the Christian Endowment, whose leaders carry the rank of deputy minister. One senior Iraqi official said that the list of ministries whose inspectors had been dismissed also included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but the ministry's public affairs office denied that on Monday. Three senior advisers to Mr. Maliki declined to comment substantively when contacted about the dismissals. "Definitely I know about it, all the details," said Yasseen Majid, a press adviser to the prime minister. "But you know all the story, so why are you asking me? It's not my specialty; it's an administrative issue." But Adel Muhsin, Mr. Maliki's coordinator of anticorruption organizations and himself the inspector general at the Health Ministry, said any suggestion that there had been political motivation for the dismissals was false. "This is absolutely completely nonsense," Mr. Muhsin said. The cabinet committee that recommended the changes, he said, was made up of "mainly professional people, not political people. Therefore, the selections. It is 100 percent based on professionalism." The United States Embassy in Baghdad did not respond on Monday to a request for comment on the dismissals. But Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads an independent oversight office in Washington, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and who is currently working in Iraq, said he knew of six of the dismissals. He said the inspectors general were vulnerable because once their offices were created, the United States provided little support and training for what was a startling concept for the bureaucracy, which was shaped by the secrecy and corruption of the Saddam Hussein era. Whatever the precise tally, the events have begun provoking accusations that Mr. Maliki, who has never been an advocate of having his government's inner workings scrutinized, might leave the posts vacant or stack them with supporters of his party, Dawa. The secrecy surrounding the moves has magnified suspicions that the government aims to cripple the oversight mechanisms put in place after the invasion. "The government put a publicity blackout on it so they can do anything they like," said Sheik Sabah al-Saeidi, a Shiite lawmaker with the Fadhila Party who heads the Integrity Committee in the Iraqi Parliament. When Parliament recently proposed a law formalizing the professional requirements that must be met by a candidate for inspector general, Mr. Saeidi said, Mr. Maliki's cabinet strongly opposed it. "They want it to become a political appointment," Mr. Saeidi said of the oversight position. "They are trying to restrict anticorruption efforts all over the country." At least two of the officials who were forced out were Christian women, Hana Shakuri of the Culture Ministry and Samia Youssef Sha'ia of the Christian Endowment. But most are simply senior Sunni and Shiite technocrats who have been at their posts for years and in several cases were originally appointed in 2004 by L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Hassan al-Safi, who was forced out of his position in the Ministry of Youth and Sport after being placed on what he said was a government list of incompetent inspectors, said that he had degrees in law, economics and auditing, and was involved in the earliest anticorruption efforts in Iraq after the invasion. "If I am not competent, prove it," said Mr. Safi, who said that he had already filed a lawsuit to force the government to renounce its assertion that he was not performing his job properly. Mr. Maliki's stance on oversight was most vividly illustrated by his long-running feud with Judge Rathi al-Rathi, the former head of the Commission on Public Integrity, an oversight agency created by the Coalition Provisional Authority. After Mr. Rathi's corruption investigations repeatedly embarrassed the Maliki government, the prime minister's office supported corruption charges against Mr. Rathi himself. Mr. Rathi's backers considered the charges to be trumped-up. Ultimately, Mr. Rathi was forced out and fled Iraq in the summer of 2007, saying he had received numerous threats to his life. He was recently granted asylum in the United States, said Chris King, a former United States Embassy official who was a senior adviser to the integrity commission. Mr. King said there had been continual political interference in Mr. Rathi's investigations. When the commission or an inspector general built a case against an official, Mr. King said, frequently "that member of the Iraqi government would then go lobby the American ambassador and the prime minister." The prime minister eventually replaced Mr. Rathi with Judge Rahim al-Ogaili. Mr. Muhsin, Mr. Maliki's anticorruption coordinator, said the judge was one of three cabinet-level officials serving on the committee that had recommended dismissing the inspectors general. The others were Mr. Maliki's chief of staff and the head of Iraq's Board of Supreme Audit. None of the three officials responded to requests for comment on Monday. It was Mr. Rathi's former chief investigator, Salam Adhoob, who testified before Congress in September that a previously undisclosed report by the Board of Supreme Audit had concluded that $13 billion in American reconstruction funds had been squandered through corruption. Mr. King said that the inspectors general were in many ways one of the last firewalls preventing the Iraqi government from keeping its operations largely in the dark. After the integrity commission, Mr. King said, "the only remnants of an independent investigatory arm looking into corruption in the government are the I.G.'s," or inspectors general. Tariq Maher and Mohammed Hussein contributed reporting.