What is the fate of the deposed presidents' frozen funds in the West?

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[size=52]What is the fate of the deposed presidents' frozen funds in the West?[/size]

[size=45]Written by: Tammam Abu Al Khair [/size]
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[size=45]Hardly a year passes without shedding light on the issue of frozen funds belonging to the Arab rulers whose peoples revolted against them from 2010 until today, and the freezing was done with the aim of “helping the authorities recover the embezzled state-owned assets.” The most important ones are Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria.[/size]
[size=45]The rulers of these countries amassed great wealth from the food of their people over the course of their rule, some of which lasted for more than 3 decades. During this period, they filled their coffers in Western banks, especially Europe. For example, the wealth of the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was estimated between 60 and 70 billion dollars. (The Sisi government estimated it in 2017 at $5 and a half billion).[/size]
[size=45]As for the late Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, reports could not determine the amount of money he looted from Tunisia and smuggled abroad, but a previous report of the Central Bank of Tunisia indicated that it had identified property and money looted from Tunisia in 10 countries, and experts refer to billions of dollars in proceeds The wealth amassed by the Ben Ali family during his reign.[/size]
[size=45]Since the Arab rulers follow the same policies in their countries, the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was in a race with his counterparts to collect money from his people and mobilize their coffers, as did Bashar al-Assad, the head of the Syrian regime, and likewise, Ali Abdullah Saleh, the late Yemeni president, also stole.[/size]
[size=45]During the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolutions, Europe and other countries were quick to impose sanctions on the Arab regimes that suppressed the popular uprisings, killed, arrested, and violated human rights principles. The sanctions began on the wealth of Arab presidents from Tunisia, followed by Egypt, then Libya, Yemen and Syria, but today, after 10 years Those frozen funds did not return to the hands of their beneficiaries or the countries that embezzled from them, which is the goal of the sanctions, but Europe began to unfreeze those funds to return them to the hands of those who stole and looted them.[/size]
[size=48]lift sanctions[/size]
[size=45]Last month, the European Union lifted the sanctions imposed on the late Egyptian President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, his family and members of his regime responsible for embezzlement of state funds. The lifting of sanctions included the unfreezing of suspected corruption proceeds, claiming that “ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] .” years, with the aim of helping the Egyptian authorities recover embezzled state-owned assets.[/size]
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[size=45]According to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] , “The idea was that after successful convictions of sanctioned individuals for corruption in their home countries, the assets would be released and returned to the people from whom they were initially stolen. However, the reality has proven to be quite different.”[/size]
[size=45]The site adds, “Take the Egyptian case, for example, about $664 million of the  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  allegedly embezzled and hidden abroad from former President Hosni Mubarak and his clan were found – and frozen – in  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] , but the total amount of embezzled funds remains unclear, because European countries have provided only partial information on the assets frozen on their soil.”[/size]
[size=45]It is worth noting that this decision is not the first of its kind. In 2017, Switzerland decided to close judicial cooperation with Cairo regarding the smuggled funds to the Mubarak regime because of what it said was the “failure of legal aid from Egypt,” which was in the interest of the Mubarak family to recover these funds![/size]
[size=45]The European Union’s decision issued last March made the sons of Hosni Mubarak celebrate that the unfrozen money will be returned to them, and Alaa Mubarak tweeted: “Above all, praise and thanks be to God, and the truth continues to emerge and the future is better, God willing.” In addition, the Mubarak family announced A study of filing a lawsuit against the union to obtain compensation, according to what Al-  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] reported , and the call comes as a result of “the wrong inclusion of it in the sanctions list, and the unjustified behavior towards it over the past decade.”[/size]
[size=45]A small amount of the sums looted by the regime of Hosni Mubarak was recovered by the Egyptian treasury, as Switzerland returned approximately  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  to Egypt in 2016 and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  two years later, but the family of ousted President Hosni Mubarak  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  in  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  sanctions imposed between 2016 and 2018. And it was later canceled, and according to the  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] : “After the European Union’s decision, it has become impossible to ask the Egyptian state again for this money,” meaning that it will return to its looters as if nothing had happened.[/size]
[size=48]60 billion[/size]
[size=45]In Tunisia, which suffers from successive political and economic crises, successive governments after the revolution were unable to solve the file of money looted by ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and frozen in his assets in the European Union.  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  by the Global Financial Integrity organization in 2019 indicate that the value of the money The looted from Tunisia exceeds 60 billion dollars since 1960, and the organization estimated that a third of this money, equivalent to 20 billion dollars, was during the rule of Ben Ali.[/size]
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[size=45]In a previous report by Noon Post, we highlighted Tunisia’s looted funds and lost rights. The report indicates that Tunisia worked in the early years of the revolution to “expose and determine the value of looted and smuggled funds abroad, through the Financial Analysis Committee of the Central Bank and thanks to its coordination with its counterparts.” Among the countries with frozen assets, while investigative judges entrusted with cases of financial corruption, during the period between the beginning of 2011 and the end of 2014, issued 64 international rogatory commissions based in their text on Chapter 43 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption and requiring its enforcement to conduct the necessary research and investigations to discover Funds, real estate and movables belonging to the persons covered by the tracking and frozen pending completion of the legal procedures to return them to the Tunisian state.[/size]
[size=45]The Tunisian moves did not last long, as the attempts ended without any significant achievements, and although the Tunisian government did not announce any estimates of the looted funds, the Tunisian Financial Transparency Organization (non-governmental) estimated the funds at 23 billion dollars.[/size]
[size=45]The period of freezing Tunisian funds in Switzerland reached the maximum in the first month of this year, i.e. ten years according to Swiss law without the Tunisian authorities completing the legal procedures to recover them, and the family of the late President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali is close to recovering these funds and disposing of them, without any Legal measures The Swiss non-governmental organization, Public Eye, said that close to Ben Ali “may have transferred 320 million dollars through the Geneva Financial Center to Switzerland, and Swiss media reported similar figures.”[/size]
[size=45]In addition, we may soon see a European decision against the looted Tunisian funds, similar to what happened in the Egyptian funds, so the money returns to its looters and not to its true [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  . Mabrouk Kourshid, “The Tunisian state worked to recover some funds from some parties, which cooperated in this file, but other countries refused to help completely, such as Morocco, the UAE and other African and Asian countries, so the  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of the  first 6 years was meager and disappointing. “.[/size]
[size=48]Gaps[/size]
[size=45]In this context, it is not forgotten how  the Bashar al-Assad regime was [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  to recover many of its frozen funds in Europe as a result of loopholes in the laws of the Union. The British “Sunday Times” newspaper reported in 2013 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his aides “were able to release hundreds of millions of funds from The euro, it was frozen in the countries of the European Union.” This was made possible due to a loophole in the union’s laws, which allows the release of frozen funds in order to purchase relief materials for Syrian citizens.[/size]
[size=45]However, the Syrian regime, according to the newspaper, used this money to finance the expenses of the Syrian regime and its forces and to buy food for the regular army, and the newspaper said that British officials believe that the funds that were frozen in all European Union countries after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, are being transferred to support Assad’s leadership and feed his army instead. A casualty of the war.[/size]
[size=45]In Yemen, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh had established a network consisting of business operations, companies and assets in Canada, America, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Southeast Asia, the UAE, the Middle East countries, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and in mid-2020,  a bank transfer report [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  65 million dollars. Dollars sent from the United Swiss Bank to two Singapore bank accounts belonging to a member of the Saleh family.[/size]
[size=45]As for the money looted in Libya from the family of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, billions of dollars were scattered between countries. No real numbers are known about them, in addition to those that were frozen in countries’ banks after the imposition of sanctions on the Gaddafi regime in 2011. In Belgium and during the previous years,   several scandals [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] The Belgian government, as investigations revealed the disappearance of up to 10 billion euros in frozen Libyan assets belonging to the late colonel.[/size]
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[size=45]The missing funds are due to the assets that were frozen from 2013 to 2017, and the value of the frozen Gaddafi amounts amounted to about 16.1 billion euros, and the United Nations concluded in September of 2018 that Belgium had bypassed the law by allowing such payments, which were made Between 2012 and 2017, according to  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  , several Belgian companies were able to take advantage of the interests of frozen Libyan funds to pay off debts owed to them by Libya.[/size]
[size=45]In sum, financial corruption was one of the most important reasons for the Arab revolutions in 2011, and the European sanctions, which included freezing the assets of the leaders of those countries, was one of the measures that encouraged the peoples, but these sanctions were of no benefit, as the money was not returned to its owners and beneficiaries, but rather kept in order to return it to those who looted it. And he stole it, as if it was a deposit, or was a partner in its theft and loss, as happened in Belgium, so that European justice and its laws would remain at stake.[/size]
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