An unusual wave of anticorruption arrests targeting senior officials in Iraq has resulted in the seizure of tens of millions of dollars – rousing public opinion across the country and bringing renewed attention to the decades-long problem of financial corruption.

The Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council on Tuesday said cash seized in an investigation into alleged corruption linked to detained Oil Ministry Undersecretary for Refining Affairs Adnan al-Jumaili had risen to about $86m. It added that 70 properties, 21 vehicles and about three kilogrammes (6.6 pounds) of gold jewellery had been seized.

The judiciary said the funds were linked to waste in projects said to be carried out by al-Jumaili and others linked to the case.

Al-Jumaili – who was also the head of the Iraqi North Refineries Company – was arrested at his home in the town of al-Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, on May 30 as part of the probe.

It came days after the new Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi ordered the investigation of contracts issued by the government in recent years to look for evidence of corruption.

The Supreme Judicial Council added that Raed al-Jubouri, the former governor of Salah al-Din governorate – where al-Jumaili is from – was also arrested. Al-Jubouri was the director of health in the governorate at the time of his arrest.

Anticorruption activists have complained that Iraq’s political structure is built around graft, with parties and politicians using their patronage networks and powers to plunder state resources.

Iraq was placed 136 out of 182 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2025, with the report noting some improvements in the country’s fight against corruption. But the report did say that “significant structural hurdles” need to be overcome for the situation to dramatically improve, highlighting activists’ complaints about the problem of systemic corruption in Iraq’s political system.

Al-Jumaili is the most high-profile government figure to be arrested on corruption charges since Prime Minister al-Zaidi took office on May 16.

Alaa Samir al-Jubouri, a leading official in the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity, was arrested in Baghdad in June, accused of corruption and wasting public funds.

Further, al-Zaidi cancelled the $764m Baghdad international airport development project due to suspected corruption, hinting that the government is taking the issue more seriously.

In one of his first decisions as prime minister, al-Zaidi established the Supreme Sovereign Council for Integrity, Oversight and Recovery of Public Funds, a body intended to tackle the problem of corruption in the public sector and procurement processes.

It will be presided over by the prime minister himself and is responsible for monitoring ministries, non-ministerial entities and governorates to prevent the waste of public funds and recover state assets.

“The Iraqi government and the prime minister regard corruption as one of the gravest challenges threatening the Iraqi state and its political order,” Iraqi government spokesman Haider al-Aboudi said in a recent news conference.

Although this process is still in its early stages, some observers are sceptical about the process and say it has yet to address older, more significant or politically sensitive cases of alleged corruption.

“I admit that this is the first time I have seen a collective anticorruption effort headed by the prime minister,” Mousa Faraj, former head of the Iraqi Federal Integrity Commission, told Al Jazeera.

“But my advice to the prime minister is to start with serious and major old files. At the top of them are the Central Bank currency auctions in previous years, where corruption reached tens of billions of dollars,” Faraj added.

On May 28, the Federal Integrity Commission announced it had foiled an alleged attempt to seize 1.5 trillion Iraqi dinars ($1.145bn) from two state-owned banks, Al-Rafidain and Al-Rasheed.

Longstanding problem

In March 2021, Iraq’s Federal Commission of Integrity estimated that $240bn had been smuggled out of the country since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, equivalent to 32 percent of Iraq’s revenues over that 18-year period.

The commission’s Asset Recovery Department has the potential to claw back the billions of dollars of state funds believed lost to corruption, but achieving this would be a difficult task.

“Restoring the stolen funds, whether from inside the country or abroad, is a very difficult process, if not impossible,” said Mohammed Raheem al-Rubie, the head of the al-Nahrain Foundation for Transparency and Integrity.

“One of the reasons for this is because of the outdated Iraqi legal system, which still [predominantly] follows the 1969 penal code. Most of the laws of this code do not cover these types of [financial] crimes that have been committed after 2003. And if they do, they are not commensurate with the scale and seriousness of the crimes committed.”

Al-Rubie said Iraq’s legal code needed to be updated to deal with the scale of post-2003 corruption in Iraq, although laws on integrity, illicit gains and money laundering have been added to the country’s legal code since.

For example, some corruption crimes are only punishable with one year in prison, despite huge sums being embezzled, he said.

A 2024 United Nations Development Programme report on corruption in Iraq said that there was a “continued reliance on broad legal frameworks that may not fully match the gravity of the corruption involved”.

“Corruption in Iraq is politically protected. Thus, it becomes a very complicated task to fight it. It is linked directly to the nature and the composition of the political system,” Ghalib Aldaamy, a university media professor and ex-employee in the Integrity Commission, told Al Jazeera.

“Can you imagine that some of those who commit such crimes believe they are not doing something wrong because they hold a religious doctrine that states that public funds belong to no one?”