ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraq’s draft 2019 budget bill has allocated 12.67 percent to the Kurdistan Region, according to figures made public by a Komal MP. A former member of the parliament’s finance committee accused the government of politicizing the budget.

A copy of the budget bill was made public by Ahmad Haji Rashid, head of Komal’s bloc in Baghdad.

According to his figures, the projected revenues for 2019 are 105 trillion Iraqi dinars ($88 billion), while expenditures are estimated at 128 trillion dinars ($107.5 billion), leading to a budget deficit of 22 trillion dinars ($18.5 billion).

The Kurdistan Region will receive 12.67 percent, roughly 8 trillion dinars ($6.7 billion). It will also receive 136 billion dinars ($114 million) from the governorate development fund and a further 102 billion dinars ($85.6 million) in loans for investments.

In post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, the Kurdistan Region received 17 percent of the federal budget annually. The figure was proportional to population estimates.

In 2014, Baghdad stopped sending money to Erbil completely after the KRG floated the idea of independently exporting oil.

The 2018 budget re-instituted the Kurdistan Region’s share, but at 12.67 percent after Baghdad amended population estimates.

Kurdish lawmakers said the budget law violated the constitution.

The preliminary draft of the 2019 budget was prepared by the outgoing Cabinet of Ministers and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Former Gorran MP Masoud Haider accused the ministers of politicizing the budget.

“The 2019 Iraqi budget bill contains violations of the Iraqi constitution and legal violations,” he stated in a post of Facebook on Wednesday.

Haider sat on the finance committee in the previous parliament.

He said that Abadi’s caretaker government has created “political hurdles” to stir up problems between Erbil and Baghdad.

“The parliament needs to send the bill back to the government and Adil Abdul-Mahdi’s government must prepare a new budget bill based on the new government’s program,” Haider added.

Prime Minister-designate Abdul-Mahdi is in the process of putting together his cabinet.

There are no official numbers for the current population of Iraq. The last census was done in 1987. Kurdistan Region’s statistic office in coordination with UN agencies recently did a demographic survey in which they relied on 2014 estimates that put Iraq’s population at 36,004,552 and the Kurdistan Region’s population at 5,122,747, which is 14.2 percent of the total.

Rudaw