Sunday 21 February 2010

Don't get them wrong please!

Who can make more than £13 million in five days? Yes, you are right, he's our friend Ashti Hawrami, the Minister of Natural Resources in Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government who himself a "British businessman."

The latest in Hawrami's scandals came today in a story published in the Times Online Web site about a secret trading shares in the U.K.'s Heritage Oil which holds a production-sharing contract in the region where Hawrami, UNFORTUNATELY, oversees its oil and gas development plans.

What Hawrami did in autumn 2008 was very simple: he bought the shares for £12,095,850 and started selling them five days later after the company announced that it had struck oil. The shares were sold for £25,070,709...WOW WHAT A SMART BUSINESSMAN YOU ARE MR. HAWRAMI!

The first scandal in Hawrami's controversial oil deals was last year when it was revealed that he acted as a secret buyer for shares in the Norway's DNO which also has a production-sharing contract in Kurdistan. He sold them later to Turkey's Genel Enerji.

As I said in one of my September's posts after DNO scandal, there is nothing in the Iraqi law allows Hawrami or even the KRG to involve in any commercial activities.

By these acts, Hawrami breaches Iraq's Penalty Law No. 111 in 1969 and the Civil-servant Disciplinary Law No. 14 in 1991. Both laws say that any civil servant in the Iraqi government, from the lowest levels to the president of the state, has no right by any mean to practice any work outside his governmental job especially the commercial activities.

And as I forecast in that post, more scandals will be revealed about this controversial Businessman-Minister and the level of corruption in the KRG officials who are alleging that what they are doing is for "all Iraqi people," not for their pockets.

So don't get them wrong please!

kassakhoon@gmail.com

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