Moammar Gadhafi has "tens of billions" of dollars in cash hidden in Tripoli, which allows him to battle an uprising despite an international freeze on Libyan assets, a report said Thursday.
Moammar Gadhafi has "tens of billions" of dollars in cash
hidden in Tripoli, which allows him to battle an uprising despite an
international freeze on Libyan assets, a report said Thursday.
The New York Times, citing
U.S.
and
foreign intelligence officials, said Gadhafi's cash -- in U.S. dollars, Libyan
dinars and possibly other foreign currencies -- is stored at the Libyan Central
Bank and other banks around
Tripoli
.
Gadhafi "likely has tens of billions in cash that he can access inside
Libya
,"
an unnamed
U.S.
intelligence official said.
The cash hoard is vast enough for Gadhafi to comfortably pay his troops,
African mercenaries and his political supporters.
Some of the cash may have been moved into Gadhafi's
Tripoli
compound Bab Al Azizia, an unnamed person with ties to the Libyan government
told the newspaper.
The same source told The New York Times that the Gadhafi regime had hired
between 3,000 to 4,000 mercenaries from sub-Saharan
Africa
and
was paying them $1,000 a day each.
United
States
officials, however, could not
confirm the numbers of mercenaries or the amount they were paid.
The African mercenaries were coming from
Mali
,
Niger
and
Sudan
--
especially from the Justice and Equality Movement rebel group operating in
Darfur
, the
source told the newspaper.
Gadhafi has likely been building up reserves since 2004, when international
sanctions against his regime began to be lifted -- and apparently feared that
sanctions could be re-imposed in the future. "He learned to keep cash
around," the source said.
Gadhafi appears to have moved billions of dollars in assets to
Libya
in
the days before protests erupted, Kenneth Barden, a lawyer who specializes in
Middle
East
financing, told The Times.
Gadhafi has "surreptitious accounts and unaccounted sums that are
significant enough to give him security even if the world caves in on
him," David Aufhauser, a top Treasury Department official under former
president George W. Bush, told the newspaper.
The
U.S.
has
frozen at least $30 billion of
Libya
's
assets,
U.S.
officials announced in late February, while the United Nations and the European
Union have also imposed sanctions and frozen assets.
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