Egyptians Can Claim Mubarak’s Stolen Billions

GENEVA, Feb 13, 2011 (IPS) - For decades, European bank accounts and trusts and the real estate market were havens for dictators seeking safe places to deposit billions of dollars they were stealing from their countries of origin.

The pressure exerted upon European private banks and justice departments by anti-corruption watchdog groups and associations of lawyers has at last made changes to one of these notorious havens for embezzled fortunes.

In Switzerland, the government just approved a law that eases the historical secrecy of Swiss private banks. The law allows for money deposited here by Third World dictators to be reimbursed to the legitimate governments of the dictators’ countries of origin.

The law, which came into effect on Feb 1, and dubbed "lex Duvalier", in reference to the infamous former Haitian dictator Jean Claude Duvalier, is being used to revise the bank accounts and trusts maintained in Switzerland by Arab dictators such as Tunisian Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian Hosni Mubarak.

"The new law allows the Swiss government to return money to their legitimate owners in cases of proven embezzlement," Valentin Zellweger, head of the department for international law at the Swiss government, told IPS.

According to official Swiss figures, the Egyptian government keeps accounts and trusts in local banks for some 3,800 billion dollars. At least one third of this amount is held in so-called custodial accounts, the typical bank Read More