Iraqi corruption probe, with twist

BAGHDAD —  Iraq’s top anticorruption watchdog, a high-profile judge whose efforts have been hailed by Americans as one of the few bright spots in the country, is himself the target of a corruption probe, officials said Saturday.

Judge Radhi Radhi, head of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, is under investigation by court authorities, accused of turning his 1,700-employee agency into a personal fiefdom and padding his salary with an extra $50,000 a year.

Radhi denies the charges, arguing that they’re part of a campaign of intimidation by government officials to quash his investigations, which include examinations of corruption in ministries controlled by Iraq’s dominant Shiite Muslim parties.

He said he has come under pressure to shut down his commission or cede its independent status. The government has ignored his requests for information, threatened his legal mandate and demanded he halt his investigations, said Radhi, who is a Shiite, but secular.

“They tell me, ‘You are not a ministry to be giving us orders,’ ” he said in an interview Saturday. “There are voices among them who say there is no need for this commission.”

Lawmakers have threatened not only to remove Radhi from his post for alleged incompetence, but to prosecute him for corruption, as detailed in an Oct. 29 affidavit submitted to the Supreme Judicial Council.

“I don’t want him to be just removed from his post, I want him to be punished according to the law,” said Sheik Sabah Saadi, a Shiite lawmaker who heads the parliamentary anti-corruption committee and has spearheaded the efforts against Radhi. “We have found financial and administrative corruption inside the integrity commission.”

Transparency International, a Berlin-based organization that monitors official graft, patronage and bribery, lists Iraq as the world’s third most corrupt nation, behind Haiti and Myanmar.

U.S. officials have hailed Radhi’s work. He has pushed for the prosecution of several former ministers and uncovered corruption in the Interior Ministry, which has been infiltrated by Shiite militias. His targets have included former Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan and former Electricity Minister Ayham Sameraei.

Radhi has worked closely with Stuart W. Bowen Jr. of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a U.S. agency created to investigate waste and fraud by U.S. officials and contractors in Iraq. That agency’s legal mandate has run out, and it may soon be folded.

The integrity commission, too, rests on precarious legal ground. It was created by an order of an American, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the former Coalition Provisional Authority, and has never been written into Iraqi law. Iraqi legislators have stalled a vote on whether to give the commission permanent status or dissolve it and let government inspectors audit their own agencies.

The affidavit submitted against Radhi accuses him of hiring staff without publicly advertising jobs.

“We have documents and we have witnesses,” Saadi said in a telephone interview from Basra. “It is not a mere accusation.”

Saadi also charged that Radhi has managed to show relatively few results, despite the nearly $20 million his agency has been allocated. Saadi called his work sloppy and unprofessional. His few successes, such as his pursuit of Shaalan, were uncovered by others, he said. Under Shaalan, who is no longer in Iraq, billions of dollars disappeared from the Defense Ministry.

“There is no clear strategy to combat corruption,” said Saadi, who plans to hold a news conference in coming days to make public his battle against Radhi.

The commission’s work “amounts to listening to complaints on a hotline and forwarding those complaints to the inspector general” of each ministry, he said, without determining whether they are true.

Radhi said he had grown used to nasty accusations by the targets of his investigations. Shaalan accused him of being partisan, and Mishaan Jaburi, a Sunni lawmaker who fled the country after being indicted on charges of stealing millions, accused Radhi of pursuing a sectarian agenda.

Radhi said the pressure on his office might be a reaction to his attempts to ferret out corruption in key Shiite-controlled ministries.

Among his commission’s current investigations are the quality of food purchased by the Trade Ministry for monthly rations, the disappearance of petroleum products under the supervision of the Oil Ministry, a lack of progress in refurbishing the railroad system and misconduct by 451 police officers who work in the Interior Ministry. Each ministry involved is controlled by a Shiite politician.

daragahi@latimes.com

Times staff writer Raheem Salman contributed to this report.