Haider al-Fawadi, a member of the movement, told Al-Monitor, “A 12% share is reasonable for the KRG, and it can be spent after the region hands over what it owes the federal government, including revenues from airports, taxes, border crossings and oil.”
“It's not reasonable to give 17% of the budget to the conclave that has just 5 million people without it handing over these resources to the federal government,” he added.
He said he feared “domestic and international pressures on the government to restart payments to Iraqi Kurdistan at the previous level,” but he added that “a majority in parliament will not allow any bill to pass that allocates more than 12% of the federal budget to the KRG.”
The leaking of a draft budget could increase pressure on the KRG to hand over its oil resources and border crossings in exchange for a bigger share of the budget or a return to 17%. But the issue will not be solved that easily. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has defended cutting the Kurds’ share of the budget and talked of “major corruption” in the KRG, as well as inaccurate statistics on the number of civil servants in local administrations.
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