The Barzani Debt Tracker - Methodology
The Barzani Debt Tracker uses public data to calculate the amount of debt the family owes, its growth, and what this amount of money could be spent on.
The tracker calculates the rolling figure to be at least:
‘The APIKUR Debt’ + ‘The Korek Original Award’ + ‘The Korek Loan Award’
These three values are defined as:
Kurdistan Regional Government debt to APIKUR member companies (The APIKUR Debt): As of March 2024, the Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR) values the debt owed by the KRG to member companies for oil produced between September 2022 and March 2023 as standing at $1 billion. The Barzani Debt Tracker assumes a conservative increase of 6.65% per annum. With a start date of March 23rd 2024, the Barzani Debt Tracker updates the current value of the debt with applied interest every one second.
AND
Iraq Telecom v. Korek (The Korek Original Award): an arbitral award issued in March 2023 in which Korek Telecom, a company owned by Sirwan Barzani, was ordered to pay Iraq Telecom Limited (IT Ltd.), a joint venture between Agility Public Warehousing Company KSCP and Orange S.A, $1.65 billion. The award specifies a variable rate of post-award interest of the SOFR three-month term plus 2% per annum, which the Barzani Debt Tracker has conservatively computed to 6.65% per annum. With a start date of March 20th 2023, the Barzani Debt Tracker updates the current value of the award with applied interest every one second.
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Iraq Telecom v. Korek (The Korek Loan Award): an arbitral award issued in September 2024 in which Korek Telecom was ordered to pay Iraq Telecom Limited (IT Ltd.), a joint venture between Agility Public Warehousing Company KSCP and Orange S.A, $1.17 billion following a dispute over a July 2011 loan agreement. No interest rate is publicly available. The Barzani Debt Tracker consequently assumes the same interest rate as The Korek Original Award: 6.65% per annum. While Sirwan Barzani is not thought to have been named in this second Korek award, he is the ultimate owner of the company. Consequently, Barzani Watch has chosen to include it in the total value owed by the family.
Three values are then divided into the total debt:
- An average of the annual salary for a nurse in Kurdistan: $13,164/year, calculated as an average from Salary Explorer and the ERI Economic Research Institute (in both cases, Iraqi values was used, owing to a lack of data specifically for Kurdistan).
- An estimated cost to build a school in Kurdistan: $1.52 million, based on a December 2022 Kurdistan Regional Government announcement describing a new school in Koya city as costing 2 billion dinars.
- An estimated cost to build a hospital in Kurdistan: $5 million, based on an April 2019 story from Kurdistan24 describing a new hospital in Erbil.