Bloomberg Business: How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy
This article was published on 7th August last year. Yes, it’s ‘old’, but it’s not dated, and if you haven’t done so already, I strongly recommend that you read it.
It’s excellent – and I would say that it is essential general knowledge for anybody living and working in Malta.
There is a reference to Malta (see below) but that’s not the main issue. Libya is such a big thing with Malta, and yet I find in conversation that most people don’t actually know what’s going on, or even have much background information.
Perhaps the biggest finds were two bank accounts containing almost €100 million ($134 million) belonging to Qaddafi’s son Mutassim, who was killed during the uprising. The accounts were located in Malta, a common offshore home for hidden bank accounts and shell companies.
So far the Libyan government has failed to get Malta to release the funds, and the transcripts of the trials are a hilarious primer in the art of not asking inconvenient questions when large amounts of money are wired from strange locations to accounts held by the son of a notorious dictator.
When the accounts were discovered, the person nominally in charge of Libya’s stolen asset recovery program was Abdalla Kablan, a 27-year-old mathematician whose experience in international finance was with a company called Exante. Based in Malta, it is a broker for, among other currencies, Bitcoin, the virtual currency favored by drug dealers and money launderers.
Kablan also happened to be a Maltese citizen, which made him either a very clever or a highly unlikely choice to represent Libya in adversarial proceedings with that country: His appointment was apparently helped by his being the son-in-law of Libya’s current minister of foreign affairs, Mohammed Abdelaziz.