WASHINGTON – Moammar Gadhafi secretly salted away more than $200 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, Gadhafi 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 the Democratic Republic of Congo or the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
Revelation of the stunning size of the portfolio may stir anger among Libyans, about one-third of whom live in poverty. And it is likely to spur an effort to return the money to Libya’s transitional government, which says it wants to embark on an ambitious plan to modernize the country after nearly 42 years of rule by Gadhafi’s whim.
During his 42 years in power, Gadhafi steered aid and investments to benefit his own family and tribe.
But Gadhafi also denied support for much of the rest of the country, especially the eastern region that historically resisted his family’s despotic grip on power.
Gadhafi’s death after he was captured by revolutionary fighters Thursday sets the stage for other governments to begin repatriating a bonanza in sequestered assets to the oil-rich but cash-poor nation.
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 Gadhafi or his aides could move them.
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