Bern, Switzerland / Lagos, Nigeria (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland insists that it does more than any other government to return funds stolen by dictators, and Nigeria is a case in point. But Nigerians are now worried about how to make sure the funds land in the right place in order to put back into the budget money taken out of government coffers illegally.
An editorial published 7 June in This Day/allAfrica notes that
According to a report from Global Financial Integrity, total illicit outflows from Africa between 1970 to 2008 may be as high as $1.8 trillion; Sub-Saharan African countries experienced the bulk of illicit financial outflows with the West and Central African region posting the largest outflow numbers. The top five countries with the highest outflow measured were: Nigeria ($89.5 billion) Egypt ($70.5 billion), Algeria ($25.7 billion), Morocco ($25 billion), and South Africa ($24.9 billion).
The editor says “It is, therefore, cheering to note that the Swiss government now wants to make it difficult for people who loot state treasuries to save looted funds in Swiss banks. We want to believe that that pledge by Switzerland’s Deputy State Secretary of the Swiss Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Pierre Helg, the other day in Abuja is sincere.”
The next step, he argues, is up to Nigeria. “there seems to be no transparency in the in the repatriation of looted funds. Nigerians deserve to know amounts repatriated as they happen and of what use the money is put. This lack of transparency has fuelled speculation that looted funds, if brought back, only meet re-looting.”
Global Forum in Paris this week in response to G-20 demand
Nigerian concern comes as Switzerland leads a two-day international conference in Paris, the Global Forum on the Recovery of Assets and Development, jointly organized by Switzerland, the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The forum is part of the lead-up to the G-20 summit in Toronto, Canada 26-27 June.
Swiss high court ruling on Haitian ex-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier’s money will lead to new law
Talloires, France, near Geneva, where the Duvaliers fled after leaving Haiti in 1986 (photo: Talloires Tourisme)
Update (links added) 23:30 Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss government Wednesday morning 3 February took the unusual step of freezing funds in a bank account once held by Haiti’s former dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, based on a special cases clause in the Swiss constitution. At the same time the Swiss supreme court published its ruling on the frozen assets, saying that they cannot be returned to the Haitian people as mandated by the Swiss Office of Justice in 2009. The court decision has prompted the Swiss Federal Council to freeze the funds long enough to pass a law that will help it avoid releasing the assets “for the benefit of the Duvalier clan, which the Federal Criminal Court deems to be a criminal organization.”
A new law would allow the Swiss parliament input on how to best return the money to Haiti.
The ruling Federal Council is asking the Foreign Affairs Department to “complete by the end of the month its work on drafting a federal law that would ultimately allow such assets to be confiscated, and to submit the draft law for consultation.” A spokesperson for the Federal Foreign Affairs Office told GenevaLunch that the law is likely to be passed in 2010. It will cover similar situations of confiscated assets, several of which have come up in recent years.
Switzerland is the only country in the past 20 years to have returned stolen “potentates” funds to the countries previously ruled by the dictators: more than CHF1.6 billion has been returned to Peru, the Philippines and Nigeria among others.
The Duvalier family has been fighting to obtain access to $5.7 million sitting in Swiss bank accounts since they were frozen in 1986, when the Haitian government made a first request for assistance to obtain what it said were stolen funds. Jean-Claude Duvalier, popularly known as Baby Doc, ruled Haiti starting in 1971, when at age 19 he became the world’s then-youngest ruler. His father, known as Papa Doc, had ruled it for the previous 13 year.
