From major players to modest entrepreneurs, businessmen are looking to make their fortune as Iraq tries to recover from three wars, nearly 13 years of United Nations (UN) sanctions and 35 years of strangling state control.
Few are waiting for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to deliver incentives to make a start.
A week after the rule of Saddam Hussein collapsed on April 9 Aysar Abdullah swapped a shoe business for a booming trade in electronics and satellite dishes.
"We used to sell shoes and as soon as Baghdad fell we realized that would not be so profitable and we went into satellite dishes instead," said Abdullah, sitting in his bustling showroom in the Karrada business district.
Deals are done with large bundles of cash.
Abdullah said he buys US$250,000 worth of electronics and satellite dishes every week or so, compared with the US$100,000 in shoes he used to bring in every three months.
"We just hand over the cash in dollars here and they hand it to our suppliers in Dubai, Syria or Jordan," he said.
Abdullah is looking to expand. All he needs, he says, is for Washington and London, the occupying powers, to improve security.
"I don't even need a banking system, we've survived without one for years," he said, turning aside to count wads of dollars and dinars handed over by the new owner of a Japanese television set.
Iraq now operates as a cash economy with only some of its banks open for simple transactions. US civilian administrator Paul Bremer last month started discussing ways to revamp the economy with Iraqi politicians and experts.
Bremer has said Iraq should start loosening restrictions on foreign ownership and investment before a sovereign elected government takes over.
Duty-free imports and the lifting of the embargo have already unleashed pent up business activity, favoring small merchants like Abdullah.
But big business needs longer term measures to create the sustained economic activity and jobs Iraq requires to rebuild.
These are the kinds of changes awaited by Mahmood al-Bunnia sitting in the company founded by his grandfather in 1910 when the Ottoman Empire still ruled Iraq.
"We need a stable political system, a stable currency and things like insurance and letters of credit," said Bunnia, a member of a board of directors that reads like a family tree.
The family, which made tomato paste in Bulgaria in the 1940s, is looking to restore some of the business ties and partnerships it lost when the United Nations imposed sanctions in 1990.
The Bunnia empire comprises about 40 companies in Iraq, including one awarded the first in-country sub-contract by the US contractor Bechtel. But the scale of business Bunnia is eying cannot be adequately served by the informal money transfer system that Abdullah still relies on or served efficiently from the satellite offices used by his family in Jordan and Dubai in the Saddam years.
"When we talk now about business in the tens and hundreds of millions, this system cannot continue," Bunnia said.
Some details of the US-led administration's economic plans are available and officials say they have revised a blueprint that emerged earlier this year envisioning privatization, tax reform and electronic stock market trading.
(China Daily July 31, 2003)
