Moammar Gadhafi may have amassed $200 billion in investments around the world, a sum that would have made him the richest man on earth but did nothing for him when he met his bloody end staring down the barrel of a rebel fighter’s gun.
The latest estimate of the strongman’s net worth, reported in the Los Angeles Times, is the largest yet, and suggests that the former dictator spent decades stockpiling lucrative holdings in foreign investments while the average Libyan earned just $12,000 each year.
Gadhafi’s massive portfolio included everything from lavish hotels in London and Russia to stock in Goldman Sachs and Italian soccer teams.
None of those assets, of course, helped Gadhafi on Thursday when he was dragged from a drainage pipe in his hometown of Sirte and shot dead to end what was for many Libyans a 42-year nightmare. According to multiple reports, the garishly opulent dictator was carrying his storied golden pistol when he died.
His blood-streaked, half-naked body remained on display yesterday in a commercial freezer in a shopping center in Misrata. Libya’s new leaders, meanwhile, will declare the country liberated today. Tens of thousands are expected to turn out for the announcement in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.
Experts say determining the exact sum of Gadhafi’s fortune could take months. But during his four decades in power, the Libyan leader accumulated $37 billion in investments in the United States, more than $30 billion in Europe and China, and, according to Libyan officials cited by the Los Angeles Times, tens of billions more in commercial holdings around the world. The figures, if correct, mean Gadhafi was the richest man in the world.
Juan Zarate, a former deputy assistant national security adviser who led the effort to find former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s global assets, said the estimate of Gadhafi’s fortune was reasonable. “It sounds plausible, certainly,” Zarate told The Daily yesterday.
He said it should be far easier to find Gadhafi’s considerable assets than it was to locate Saddam’s fortune, since the Libyan ruler didn’t have to hide his investments under strict sanctions in the last years of his regime.
While Gadhafi is thought to have squirreled away billions in Libyan funds and aid money for his own benefit and that of his family, many of the investments themselves were legitimate and made in the open. “His holdings have been notorious. They weren’t trying to hide their assets,” Zarate said of Gadhafi and his seven sons.
Experts say Gadhafi family assets and Libyan state assets are to a large extent one and the same, since the Gadhafis used parts of the Libyan state to invest abroad. Just some of those investments include millions of dollars of stock in Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, U.S. bonds and even Halliburton.
In Europe and Russia, the family had extensive holdings in five-star hotels, and elsewhere in Africa and around the world they owned large stakes in commercial mining and oil companies.
And then there are the Gadhafi family’s lavish palaces and mansions. The family has swanky real estate holdings from Englewood, N.J., where the dictator owned a 10,000 square-foot estate, to Zimbabwe, where he was rumored to have bought the former mansion of Grace Mugabe, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s wife.
But Zarate said it could take years for the new Libyan government to recoup the money, since many of Gadhafi’s holdings involve legitimate foreign banks and shareholders who will still want to see a return on their investment. “The tricky part is not how you add it up but how you disentangle and determine ownership interests for the assets that may be out there,” he said.
Still, the mission in Libya cost the United States alone more than $1 billion, and international officials are likely to press for a quick return of the funds so the country is able to rebuild using its own resources. The money could also serve as a boost for the country’s new government, which the United States has pledged to support.
@thedaily.com
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