The policing side is tricky, he admits; when they are approached by the police, many of the people involved say they have gone bankrupt, even if that is not always true.
“We have arrested people here and we have also tried to track down those who went overseas,” Sarkout Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Sulaymaniyah police, told NIQASH. “But they tend to do things like change their names and even their country of origin. It’s not an easy mission.”
There are a lot of these kinds of cases coming before the Kurdish courts, says a senior public prosecutor, Bakhtiar Ali.
“Unfortunately the failure of citizens to exercise due diligence in these cases has led to some people losing a lot of money,” Majid Othman, a local politician who heads the Kurdish parliament’s committee to protect consumer rights, told NIQASH. The question of wrong doing in the local dollar markets has been discussed in parliament but no resolution has been agreed upon, he added.
Which means that for now, those locals who have lost money, simply have to wait and see; they don’t know if they will ever get their money back.
Comments are closed.