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The U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint this week to seize Kurdish general Mansour Barzani’s Beverly Hills mansion, alleging he bought and renovated it with $30 million in proceeds from a scheme that defrauded the U.S. Department of Defense during its fight against the Islamic State.
OCCRP obtained the April 22 complaint, which identified the secluded house on the affluent, tree-lined residential street of Foothill Road. A realtor has advertised the property as Foothill Manor, a French-style villa with a theater, swimming pool, and European gardens.
The DoJ complaint alleged that Barzani, whose brother Masrour serves as prime minister of the semi-autonomous territory Iraqi Kurdistan, was paid bribes by a contractor based in the U.S. state of Virginia for exclusive access to deliver jet fuel at Kurdistan’s Erbil International Airport from 2016 to 2020.
Erbil airport, controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga forces, was a delivery point for fuel used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria during its Operation Inherent Resolve. Between 2015 and 2023, the DoD’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) awarded contracts totaling more than $700 million to the Virginia-based contractor, said the complaint.
Upon issuing the complaint, the DoJ released a press statement alleging that “officers of the contractor agreed to pay General Mansour Barzani, a senior Peshmerga official, a bribe of $0.25 per liter for exclusive access to deliver jet fuel in Kurdistan for the U.S. military and coalition forces and received hundreds of millions of dollars under DLA contracts.”
The complaint did not directly name the company that allegedly bribed Barzani, calling it “Contractor 1.” However its case provides contract numbers, which identify the company as Virginia-based logistics company DGCI.
Separately, a 2017 Kurdish government memo decrees that the only companies approved to deliver fuel to the airport were DGCI, its Kurdish subcontractor Triple Arrow, and a third company based in Kurdistan named Rainfloods.
With this exclusive access, DGCI was able to charge fees as high as $10 per gallon to the U.S. government for jet fuel. The standard price of jet fuel paid by the DoD between 2016 and 2020 ranged between $2.14 per gallon and $3.2 per gallon, according to its guidelines.
“Pretty crazy that [Contractor 1] is delivering fuel in Syria and IRaq [sic] for over $10 per gallon. Can you imagine what [one competitor], [another competitor], and all these companies must be thinking," said a contractor message cited in the court document.
OCCRP sought comment from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s permanent representative in Washington, DC, and sent email requests for comment from Mansour Barzani and DGCI representatives. None answered OCCRP requests to comment by the time of publication.
Both Mansour and Masrour are sons of Iraqi Kurdistan’s founding president, Masoud Barzani, who led Kurdish peshmerga fighters against Saddam Hussein’s government during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
The luxurious Beverly Hills mansion is not the only property owned by their family in the U.S. An OCCRP investigation last year revealed that Gen. Mansour Barzani, his brother, Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, and their three other brothers used anonymous shell companies incorporated in Delaware and the British Virgin Islands to acquire over $100 million in U.S. properties, along with luxury goods and Arabian horses.
The investigation found that tens of millions of dollars used in those purchases were supplied by Kurdish conglomerates involved in oil and military contracting.
