Washington: Muammar Gaddafi secretly salted away more than $200 billion (Dh734 billion) in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world before he was killed, about $30,000 for every Libyan citizen and double the amount that Western governments previously had suspected, according to senior Libyan officials.
The new estimates of the deposed dictator's hidden cash, gold reserves and investments are "staggering," one person who has studied detailed records of the asset search said Friday. "No one truly appreciated the scope of it."
If the values prove accurate, Gaddafi will go down in history as one of the most rapacious as well as one of the most bizarre world leaders, on a scale with the late Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire or the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
Though Gaddafi's foreign investments would seem to offer a bonanza for the transitional government, it is struggling to reclaim the money because of legal barriers created by a UN freeze on Libyan assets and national laws designed to ensure seized assets are only released to the legal owner.
Frozen assets
US and European authorities said on Friday that they intended to quickly hand over frozen assets to the transitional Libyan government. But so far, the UN has authorised release of only $1.5 billion from accounts in the US, and the Obama administration has turned over $700 million of that amount, said Marti Adams, a Treasury Department spokeswoman.
Some African nations were reluctant to freeze Libyan accounts at all because of their loyalty to Gaddafi. Others feared that freezing Libyan assets could hurt their domestic economies as bills and workers went unpaid.
During his 42 years in power, Gaddafi steered aid and investment to benefit his own family and tribe, but denied support for much of the country, especially the eastern region that historically resisted his family's despotic grip on power.
Obama administration officials were stunned last spring when they found $37 billion in Libyan regime accounts and investments in the United States, and they quickly froze the assets before Gaddafi or his aides could move them.
Governments in France, Italy, England and Germany seized control of another $30 billion or so. Investigators estimated that Gaddafi had stashed perhaps another $30 billion elsewhere in the world, for a total of about $100 billion.
But subsequent investigations by American, European and Libyan authorities determined that Gaddafi secretly sent tens of billions more abroad over the years and made sometimes lucrative investments in nearly every major country, including much of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, officials said on Friday.
Most of the money was under the name of government institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority, the Libyan Foreign Bank, the Libyan National Oil Corp and the Libya African Investment Portfolio. But investigators said Gaddafi and his family members could access any of the money if they chose to.
The new $200 billion figure is about double the prewar annual economic output of Libya, which has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa.
Officials of the transitional government point to the secret transfer of so much wealth as proof that Gaddafi, who once gave himself the title "King of Kings," had imperial ambitions for himself but little concern for most Libyans.
Gaddafi was sending vast sums abroad "at a time when Libyans were struggling for the money they needed for schools, hospitals and all sorts of infrastructure," said one person close to the council, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are ongoing.
— Los Angeles Times
