KRG "Giving Out Land to Phantom Investors"

In fact, he said, it was a tiny example when compared to other larger pieces of land that had also been gifted as “investment projects”. Other larger pieces of property intended for large investments had only resulted in beauty salons or small furniture stores, Salih noted.

According to Salih, thousands of acres of state owned land had been similarly gifted but hardly any of them were actually bringing any economic benefits to Iraqi Kurdistan. “If this continues, the new generation will not have enough land in the future,” Salih complained.

“Giving lands to investors without any restrictions has created a number of very rich people here, at the expense of the region’s interests,” Sarhank Faraj Mohammed, a Change party MP in the Kurdish parliament, told NIQASH.

Part of the reason for the gifting of land to investors by local authorities is due to 2006’s law on investment in Iraqi Kurdistan. The law was passed in order to encourage investment and said, among other things, that land should be leased to potential investors at low rentals in order to encourage investment.

According to official statistics, over the past five years local private sector and foreign investments of various kinds were estimated at around US$17 and a half billion. And commission officials were satisfied with their achievements even though they said “they were below expectation”.

If a project was considered “strategic” and in the public interest, the investors could buy or lease the land at lower than market prices and perhaps even be given the land.

According to the official information from the investment board, since 2006, 320 investment projects were approved and granted licenses. Of these 277 were initiated by local investors, 24 are owned by foreign investors and 19 are joint ventures between locals and foreign investors. The amount of land allocated to these projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, free of charge, amounts to 36,971 dunums (In Iraq, each dunum equals 2,500 square metres) which equals almost 92 and a half million square meters.