Official confession of oil smuggling IraqI: How did state documents reveal what successive governments have been ignoring? NIRIJ

Official confession of oil smuggling IraqI: How did state documents reveal what successive governments kept smuggling?

"Regulatory and administrative loopholes" in maritime transportation have opened the door to crude oil and fuel oil smuggling, say reports from the Financial Supervisory Board, warning of the dangers of its spillovers by observers of loading operations "the impact is not limited to loss of revenue, but extends to the Iraq oil reputation". Outside of the tracking system, loading operations, represented by security surveillance and electronic tracking systems, create an ideal environment for smuggling networks to operate, raising doubts about the origin of certain loading operations.

On January 9, 2020, Ministry of Oil warned, in an official book, that ship-to-ship transfers of oil could become a port for smuggling crude oil and oil products if not subject to strict oversight. This warning was not a theoretical assessment, but was issued only months after a contract awarded to a private company the right to manage maritime transport operations within Iraq territorial waters.

Five years later, the Federal Financial Supervisory Board returned to this file, and in its annual report for 2025, it documented supervisory and administrative loopholes that accompanied the Department of Shipping, that they contributed to the smuggling of crude oil and fuel oil, and concluded that a number of measures that were supposed to prevent all this had not been implemented.

The report does not stop at the recording of administrative infractions, but is based on official correspondence between Ministry of Oil, the general port company Iraq, and the Iraq oil marketing company (Somo), and the Integrity Authority, to uncover a series of loopholes that began with a contract signed with a private company in 2019, ended with the emergence of carriers outside the official export system, disrupted ship control systems, and certificates of origin suspected of falsification.

In contrast to these facts, the official discourse continued to deny the existence of oil smuggling operations in Iraq. In a television interview dated 8 September 2025, the then Deputy Oil Minister, Bassem Mohammed, who currently holds the position of Oil Minister, said that talk of oil smuggling is "baseless," affirming that the Ministry possesses a monitoring system that tracks the barrel from production to export, which contradicts what the Federal Board of Supreme Audit documented in its report.