Playing Monopoly With Iraqi Money
by Loretta Napoleoni
The biggest transfer of cash in history took place from May 2003 to June 2004 when the U.S. Federal Reserve of New York shipped $12 billion in bills of various denominations to war-torn Iraq. Over the course of one year, a fleet of C-130s carried, from New York to Baghdad, 484 pallets weighing a total of 363 tons and holding 281 million bank notes. This is not an advertisement for a new board game but the summary of a memorandum prepared for a meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, which is examining the “reconstruction” of Iraq under Paul Bremer.
No proper record of the funds, which were distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is available. They seem to have been disbursed like Monopoly money. Contractors were paid in cash from the back of pickup trucks; thousands of “ghost employees,” people enlisted in ministerial jobs that did not exist, were paid salaries with bundles of currency; $1 million was stolen from the CPA vault and nobody seemed to be bothered; $500 million was disbursed under the heading “TBD” (”to be determined”). An obscure consulting firm from San Diego was in charge of certifying the distribution of the money, yet it never conducted any review of internal controls, as was contractually required. (more…)