Iraqi Finance Minister Ali Allawi said that the size of his country's external debt reached 160 trillion dinars ($ 133.3 billion).
He added during a session to discuss the budget in Parliament yesterday, Tuesday, "The size of the total debt constitutes 80-90% of the national product."
He explained that 40 billion of the foreign debt of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is compensation for the first Gulf War that broke out in 1991 after Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.
Baghdad refuses to acknowledge another $ 40 billion worth of Saudi debt for weapons and support that the regime of late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein obtained during the war with Iran in the 1980s.
In 1991, an international compensation commission was formed, which obligated Baghdad to pay $ 52.4 billion to individuals, companies, governmental organizations and others, who incurred direct losses from Kuwait’s invasion of Iraq.
Iraq has not yet approved a budget for the current year 2020, due to the decline in financial revenues due to the decline in oil prices in global markets due to the consequences of the Corona virus.
The government and parliament are moving to approve a budget for the remaining three months of this year, according to what the Finance Ministry announced last August.
Iraq is the second largest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) after Saudi Arabia, with an average of 4.5 million barrels per day, according to the organization’s figures for last March.
Iraq relies 97% on oil revenues to finance the country's annual budget.
Since last March, the authorities have taken a series of austerity measures aimed at reducing expenditures in line with the decline in revenues, and have made wide adjustments in the management of financial revenues, most notably the replacement of senior employees at border ports, in an effort to end corruption and supply the state treasury with money collected from customs.