 A top Shia leader tipped to become Iraq's next prime minister has branded Iyad Allawi's interim government as the most corrupt in the country's history.
| This, coming after the Saddam Hussein regime? My breath is taken away. |
A close confidant of Grand Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani, Husain Shahristani lashed out at the Allawi government and singled out defence minister Hazim Shaalan as the main offender. "It is very well known in the country that the corruption is very widespread from the police to the judicial systems
as a matter of fact Iraq has never known the level of corruption prevailing now," Shahristani said.
| How many palace has he built with the national grocery money? |
"A lot of public funds have gone missing under the Coalition Provisional Authority
and even now," he said, of the disbanded US occupation authority. Shahristani took Shaalan to task for the defence ministry's transfer of $300 million to Lebanon as part of an arms deal last month. "The fact that the minister of defence, on the day there were four suicide bombings in the capital, spends all his day at the airport trying to take a few hundred million dollars in cash out of the country before the elections doesn't speak very well for the government's performance." Shahristani, formerly a nuclear scientist who spent 10 years in the Abu Ghraib prison, vowed the next government would review all suspect contracts made under the Allawi cabinet. "One thing we are going to pursue is that all suspicious contracts should be properly examined and any funds that have been misused should be returned to the public
and these things should be explained to the Iraqi people," he said.
| This sounds like that infighting we heard about yesterday... |
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