The efforts of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to recover billions in dictators' assets

...the dictators and their inner circles had spent decades amassing and hiding vast fortunes, and much of the wealth was not easy to find. Libyan investigators say they have identified tens of billions of dollars in Swiss banks alone that was never frozen — all of it skimmed from Libya’s vast oil wealth and disguised under innocuous names. In Tunisia and Egypt, the new governments are pursuing foreign real estate, yachts and bank accounts that are also said to be worth billions.

Investigators in all three countries say they now face formidable obstacles in tracing and recovering the money. In Libya, stolen oil proceeds were often laundered through complex foreign partnerships that gave them a whiff of legitimacy. In Egypt and Tunisia, the new governments are trying to recover the assets of the ruling families and of their allies in business and industry, which they say were gained through cronyism and corruption, if not outright theft. Proving that those insider fortunes were gained illicitly can be extremely hard, especially when foreign legal systems are involved.

So far, almost none of the “shadow assets” have been returned. In March, the Libyan authorities gained ownership of a $15 million house in north London that belonged to Saadi el-Qaddafi, one of the former dictator’s sons. Two aircraft in France and Switzerland belonging to the former Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, worth a total of $30 million, were transferred to the country’s new government last year. And the state assets frozen last year are gradually being made available.

“Recovering these assets is not easy,” said Robert Palmer, an investigator with the anticorruption group Global Witness. “First you must find the assets. Second, you must prove they are owned by the politician in question. Third, you must prove they were corrupt, and this requires evidence-gathering by the requesting country that is costly, difficult and time-consuming.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/world/middleeast/libya-egypt-and-tunisia-try-to-recover-assets.html?_r=1

Good luck to all three countries in recovering the billions in assets that their dictators stole and hid abroad. Obviously being a dictator is a very financially rewarding. Talk about the .1%.