IFD: We have achieved investments of about $1.5 billion

Baghdad - INA

The Executive Director of the Iraq Fund for Development, Advisor to the Prime Minister for Investment Affairs, Muhammad al-Najjar, told the Iraqi News Agency (INA), “Since its establishment less than a year ago, it has achieved three achievements, the first of which is: signing 17 memorandums of understanding with 17 different companies (Saudi, British and American) to enter Iraq.

Al-Najjar added, "The value of the total investments achieved by these memorandums approached one and a half billion dollars," pointing out that "these imports for the first time enter Iraq, not in the field of energy, but in the field of industry, agriculture, and gas production, that is, industrial gases.".

He pointed out that “the second achievement was the launch of the investment schools project, and applications were submitted to build 2,000 schools through investment, and the state rents them from investors, which saves huge sums of money, since for the price of 100 schools we can build 1,000 schools in a much shorter period of time than was thought.” That is, school crises will be resolved as quickly as possible.”

He continued: “As for the third achievement, it represented the launch of social projects for the first time, such as building schools and so on, implemented through the private sector, and for the first time we can attract the private sector to this number and this number of investments related to the state, which is considered a fundamental change. 

He pointed out that "there is an international desire to enter the fund, but our tendency is for participation to be through companies investing in Iraq, and not directly in the fund, because the fund has the peculiarity of being financed from the general budget and subject to the laws of the Iraqi state."

He stated that "funds and companies often prefer to operate under the laws of the private sector, so we have attracted investments for companies," stressing that "the amount of investments that entered compared to the fund's capital is very large." 

He concluded by saying: "We are currently working according to the rule that for every dinar we attract ten dinars, meaning that if a trillion is allocated, we try to set investment rates worth ten trillion dinars in exchange for it."