IRAQ’S PARLIAMENTARY SPEAKER says that the amount of missing reconstruction funds could be as high as $18.7 billion – about three times higher than previously estimated, Al Jazeera reports.

The money was withdrawn from a fund generated through Iraqi oil proceeds and surplus money from the UN’s oil-for-food programme. The fund was set up for the country’s reconstruction by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York using Iraqi money which was withheld from the country because of sanctions during Saddam Hussein’s regime.

It was being safeguarded by the US.

Iraqi parliamentary speaker Osama al-Nujaifi says that “there is a lot of money missing during the first American administration of Iraqi money in the first year of occupation”. He says that money should be accounted for.

Last summer, Al Jazeera reported that an audit from the US special investigator for Iraq reconstruction blamed bad bookkeeping for the US’s inability to account for billions of the reconstruction fund.

The LA Times reported last week that US defence officials are unable to account for $6.6bn in cash which was flown to Iraq eight years and earmarked for Iraq’s reconstruction. Instead, federal officials say that the cash could have been stolen in what would be the “largest theft of funds in national history”, according to Stuart Bowen, the  special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Officials have already revealed that the cash was simply stuffed into bags and a 2005 investigation found evidence of “substantial waste, fraud and abuse in the actual spending and disbursement of the Iraqi funds”.