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How Safe If Banking In Libya?

How Safe If Banking In Libya?

From The Independent

As the London financial consultant boarded his Afriqiyah Airways flight at Gatwick, he expected just another business trip to the newly rehabilitated Gaddafi-era Libya.

Thanks to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s opening up of relations with the dictator, London-to-Tripoli had become a well-trodden route for British execs seeking oil or access to the money resulting from it.

Not all of these businessmen had the Libyan people’s best interests at heart, as a series of legal disputes trundling through the courts in London are now alleging.

In particular, investment banks and hedge funds, mainly in London and Paris, who allegedly persuaded the country to invest the impoverished nation’s oil money in financial products. In some cases, these triggered instant profits of millions of pounds for the banks, but left the Libyans nursing losses in the billions.

 

Written by Jim Armitage /Read more at The Independent