Freezing tyrants’ assets is easy, but how much will we send back to Tripoli?
‘Queen freezes Gaddafi family assets’ says a headline. That’ll teach the unhinged Libyan dictator to compare himself to our blessed monarch, as he did in one of his recent rants. But for all the spin about an emergency Privy Council meeting at Windsor Castle on Sunday (I’m imagining the Duke of Edinburgh popping in to say, ‘Do hurry up, dear, Top Gear’s started’), I’ll be interested to see just how much loot is eventually liberated from London accounts and returned to whoever forms a legitimate new government in Tripoli.
Precedents are not encouraging. Our bankers remain more reluctant even than the Swiss to open suspect safe-deposit boxes. The gnomes of Zurich and Zug have taken substantial steps to clean up their reputations as custodians of dirty money, and have been quick to use a law requiring identification of ‘beneficial ownership’ to sequester anything that might carry the fingerprints of the Mubaraks of Cairo or Mr and Mrs Ben Ali of Tunis, as well as the Gaddafi circus.
A landmark case was that of the Nigerian president Sani Abacha, who salted away billions of his country’s oil revenues. In 2006, eight years after Abacha’s death, the then finance minister of Nigeria told the Independent that Switzerland had ‘set the example’ by returning $500 million. But what about Britain, land of fair play and financial rectitude? ‘Our president has raised it many times with prime minister Blair. Eventually he returned $3 million.’ The rest, apparently, ‘went somewhere else… while all the discussion was going on’.
The enduring signal
The good news is that this is not an oil spike. The very bad news is that we might be heading for one.
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