Changing of Iraq’s currency represents largest corruption process in country’s history, official says

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The Economic Advisor of Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has described the plan of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) to change the Iraqi dinar as “the worst corruption and money-laundering process in the history of Iraq .”  “The CBI must understand that it is playing with fire and undermining the course of the consumers, producers and the economic changes in the country,” Abdul-Hussein al-Anbaky told IraqiNews.com news agency on Sunday, adding that the said step was taking place “at a time when the Iraqi economy was suffering from instability and chaos.”

Anbaky’s statement was issued after one day had passed on an announcement by the Central Bank of Iraq of its intention to cancel the zeros from the Iraqi dinar and to change it, in order to ease out the current inflation, and to encourage citizens to use their own currency, instead of depending on the US dollar.  “The changing of the currency shall be the greatest corruption process in the history of Iraq , because the currency counterfeiting Mafias are ready to change the counterfeited currency with the new currency,” Anbaky said, adding that “the money-laundering merchants would come with trillions of Iraqi dinars to change them.”   Anbaky, at his position as the government’s economic advisor, had called on the Economic Committee of the Council of Ministers “not to respond to the draft-law for changing the Iraqi dinar, raised by the CBI to the Council for ratification.”