ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court on Tuesday issued its verdict on the lawsuit filed by President Abdul Latif Rashid regarding the salaries of Kurdistan Region’s civil servants, ruling to nationalize the Region’s salaries using the same measures applied in the federal government.

The top court issued “a ruling to implement the process of nationalizing the salaries of Kurdistan Region employees in accordance with the nationalization instructions issued by the Central Bank of Iraq [CBI].”

The process shall be carried out in coordination between the finance ministries of the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the verdict added. The employees were granted freedom to choose their preferred banks, provided that it is one licensed by the CBI.

The court rejected the other elements included in Rashid’s lawsuit, stating that ruling on those issues were not part of the court’s jurisdiction.

Rashid’s legal team announced earlier this month that they had filed a lawsuit against Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, and Finance Minister Taif Sami, over the salaries of the Kurdistan Region’s civil servants.

The lawsuit had additionally called on the top court to issue an urgent order that would oblige the federal government to finance the salaries of Kurdistan Region civil servants on a continuous basis without interruption.

It also asked for obliging the federal Ministry of Finance to pay the salaries of all previous months and upcoming months “without interruption or delay under any pretext.”

Rashid’s lawsuit, filed in January, had also called for amending Articles of the Iraqi federal budget relating to the Kurdistan Region’s oil, but that element was dropped after the parliament approved the amendments during a session in early February.

The lawsuit came only days after KRG’s Finance Minister Awat Sheikh Janab announced that they had reached an agreement with the Iraqi federal government to finance the salaries of the Region's civil servants for the entirety of 2025 "without any issues.” 

Salaries of the Kurdistan Region’s civil servants and the Region’s share of the federal budget have long been a point of contention between the federal and regional governments. 

KRG spokesperson Peshawa Hawramani in January told The New Region that for the last quarter of 2024 Baghdad sent less than two trillion dinars to the KRG for civil servant salaries - an amount that was around a trillion dinars short of what is needed to pay the salaries of the last three months of last year, despite prior agreements between Erbil and Baghdad.