Brussels investigating judge Michel Claise has issued an international arrest warrant against Ali Mahmoud , the chairman of the Libyan Investment Authority. The Brussels prosecutor’s office confirms this tonight, after the newspaper De Tijd had already reported on the arrest warrant on 8 January. That order is part of the judicial investigation that investigating judge Claise is conducting into funds from the Libyan government that disappeared from the bank Euroclear.
The judicial inquiry was launched after a civil complaint filed against the Libyan state, emanating from Prince Laurent’s non-profit organization GSDT (Global Sustainable Development Trust). This non-profit organization had a contract with Libya for a reforestation project, but in 2010 Libya unilaterally terminated that contract. Since then, Prince Laurent has been trying to get compensation: the Libyan government should pay the non-profit organization more than 50 million euros. The liquidators of the non-profit organization had gone to court for this and in November 2014 the Court of Appeal also ruled in their favor.
In his investigation, the investigating judge came across four accounts at Euroclear that the United Nations had blocked. The money in those accounts, some 15 billion, originally belonged to the clan of the late Libyan dictator Gaddafi but had been blocked by the UN as part of international sanctions against the dictator. The investigating judge had the accounts seized when it turned out that more than 2 billion in interest had disappeared from the accounts.
Despite the UN ban, that money is said to have been released by the Belgian government and transferred to foreign accounts in London and Bahrain. According to De Tijd, there are rumors that Libya has paid overdue invoices from the Walloon arms supplier FN with part of the money. Investigating Judge Claise has already had several top officials from the Department of Finance questioned and sent a lengthy questionnaire to Mahmoud. He has still not responded to this, after which the investigating judge decided to issue an international arrest warrant.
UN refuses thawing of funds vzw Prince Laurent
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