Ministries of Defense, Trade, Health, Municipalities, electricity – the most corrupt ministries in Iraq, Parliament official says.

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The spokesman for the Iraqi Parliament’s Integrity Committee, Khalid Abdullah al-Alwany, has charged the ministries of trade, electricity, defense, health and municipalities to be “the most corrupt ministries in Iraq , and all the 17 officials charged with corruption belong to those ministries.”   “We, at the Integrity Commission, have uncovered from the dossiers of the ministries of defense, trade, municipalities, health and electricity, to be the ministries with the highest corruption level, along with 17 of their officials wanted for corruption cases,” Alwany told IraqiNews.com news agency on Tuesday.   He said that one of the wanted elements was a former minister, along with a current cabinet minister, as well as under-secretaries and director-generals in the said ministries.   Alwany said that Iraq “is considered the third most corrupt state in the world and there is no institution, belonging to the State of Iraq that is without some type of corruption.”   “There are political pressures, even by the Council of Ministers, against the Integrity Commission, but we don’t take it into consideration, but we insisted to cancel Article 136b of the Iraqi Law, that covers the corruptors, whose files were sent to the Integrity Commission,” he said.   Alwany said that the Integrity Commission had discovered 352 candidates, with false certificates, who had been nominated for the Provinces elections in 2009, whose cases were sent for the judiciary and 70 percent of them were sentenced and others are being chased.   “The Integrity Commission had found 102 false documents for the candidates of the last nationwide elections in 2010, whose 70 percent of their files were sent to the Integrity Commission, with 30 percent of them investigated and 2 of them sentenced,” he concluded.   SKH (RT) 839