The new Iraq receives foreign aid worth close to $US100 billion ($A126 billion) and the corruption watchdog Transparency International says it could become "the biggest corruption scandal in history".
...Like many other Iraqis, businessmen invariably make then-and-now comparisons with Saddam Hussein. Saddam ran his own massive corruption of the UN oil-for-food program and he and his cronies regularly demanded a cut of any new business or contract. But Jawad, a Shiite with no brief for his former leader, said: "I'd say that about 10 per cent of business was corrupt under Saddam. Now it's about 95 per cent. We used to have one Saddam, now we have 25 of them."
The corruption is not just local. A legal battle in the US over the performance of Custer Battles, a small US firm that previously had never won a Washington tender, shows how contractors can avoid supervision and rort their books in postwar chaos.
Documents leaked to the US media and accounts by whistleblowers in the company, which had contracts in Iraq worth more than $US30 million, reveal its tactics - invoicing Washington for $US2.1 million for work worth less than $US1 million; setting up shell companies in the Cayman Islands to submit padded sub-contract invoices to return profits as high as 130 per cent, instead of a 25 per cent ceiling imposed by its contracts.
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