Baghdad The specialist in economic affairs, Ali Al-Fariji, confirmed: “The government’s allocations to support the stalled projects are few and they cannot accommodate the stalled and lagging projects.”
Al-Fariji said in a statement to the National Iraqi News Agency / NINA /: “According to the data of the Ministry of Planning regarding projects in various sectors and their implementation stages, there are 6250 projects under construction that needs to provide more than 126 trillion dinars to complete them, not to mention 1497 projects between completely suspended or withdrawn or they have not been started at all,” noting: “The recent governments have provided approximately 828 billion Iraqi dinars to support these projects, and in economic accounts they cannot be considered as allocations that can complete any of the projects referred to.”
He added: “Investment and the private sector are the two bases that the Iraqi economy needs in order to form a sufficient charge to advance it (Jump Start), but these two bases are not only absent as a real presence in an economic concept in the Iraqi economic arena, but their absence is exploited by brokerage offices and suspicious deals under the title (investment and the private sector), to become another distortion added to the size of the economic distortions in the Iraqi arena.
The economic expert stressed: “Real investment needs to unify the investment map in Iraq in a unified manner and a unified management within accurate readings of all sectors that need investment, with defining the features of the projects and their size as well as the size of the contribution to them and scheduling the priority for these projects for each stage, and drawing a real map of the areas and lands in which investment projects are established or worked, without disputes, approvals, or other sterile bureaucracy.
He continued: “Investment also needs to reformulate the definition of the investor, that he has sufficient money and technology to establish his investment inside the country, meaning not to rely on the generous government loans whose money went to the accounts of the corrupt and their brokers within what is called (investment projects in the previous stages)” .
Source: National Iraqi News Agency