Registry official hid 95 properties under husband and relatives, commission says

SALAH AL-DIN — An assistant director at the Salah al-Din Real Estate Registration Directorate concealed ownership of dozens of properties by putting them in the names of her husband, relatives and intermediaries, the Federal Commission of Integrity said, with investigators tracing about 95 properties across three governorates.

She is already in custody over money laundering, the commission said, without naming her or giving the date of her detention. Her husband was detained under a judicial warrant in a parallel inquiry into unexplained wealth. Under questioning he acknowledged that about 27 properties were nominally in his name and others in the names of relatives and intermediaries who dealt with his wife, and said she was the true owner and that the money came from bribes paid by citizens and benefits derived from her position, according to the commission.

A search of her home in Tikrit turned up original deeds, preliminary records and purchase contracts for about 95 properties in Salah al-Din, Baghdad and Diyala. Investigators also seized property registers, 31 blank forms bearing people’s fingerprints, four computers — one of them a directorate machine used to access barcodes, found in her house — along with dinars and dollars, gold jewellery, powers of attorney, files on citizens’ transactions and a late-model vehicle belonging to her husband. She is among the employees required to file financial disclosure statements.

The husband was presented to the Salah al-Din investigative court for integrity cases, and the judge ordered him held under Article 36 of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Law of 2015.

It is the fifth case this month involving land records. The National Security Service arrested 61 people in Muthanna on Friday over an alleged forgery network of officials, lawyers and real estate offices, with more than 90 forged land allocation and registration transactions and about 2 billion dinars in losses. Municipality employees and brokers were held in Nasiriyah this month over forged documents for residential plots, two Najaf municipality legal staff were caught taking a bribe to close a case over a forged barcode on a land document, and 13 people were arrested in Diwaniyah over falsified papers used to obtain loans and residential land.