Kleptocracy

It is the way of so much of the developing world. The practice literally provided the fertile soil for Islamists to enlist “soldiers of God” to wreak havoc against Israel and the West and to generate a vast culture of support from the masses who once believed that their quality of life would soon mirror the images of Western lifestyle that permeated film and television… but had/have long since given up hope, needing to explain their habitual poverty as part of their path to heaven. “Kleptocracy” is that magnificent word for “government by corruption,” where harsh leaders extract untold wealth from their impoverished nations and their benefits of “leadership.”

Indeed, all any dictatorial and economically resplendent leader of a third world nation needed to do for most of the 1960s till the fall of communism in the early 1990s was declare himself and his nation to be “anti-communist” to receive vast riches and the American military aid (and resulting power) necessary to keep them. Today, the United States has reduced its support of such corrupt leaders – mostly because communism failed – but old habits die hard. Afghani President Hamid Karzai and his cronies remain among the most corrupt leaders on earth, but they were literally installed into office with the powerful efforts of the United States military.

What would you think of a president of a tiny African nation, hardly born wealthy, whose family somehow managed to purchase “a $6.5 million house in the fashionable Los Angeles enclave of Bel Air [which was traded in for a] luxurious villa overlooking the ocean in Malibu [pictured above] for $30 million... decorated ... with fedoras, jewel-encrusted apparel and music-industry awards acquired during auctions of the belongings of the pop star Michael Jackson... two Bentley automobiles... eight Ferraris, seven Rolls-Royces, four Mercedes-Benzes, two Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin and a Maserati... [adding] two high-performance racing boats to his fleet for $2 million... [and] a $38 million Gulfstream G-V jet.”? According to the United States Department of Justice and summarized in the Washington Post, October 30^th. The dictator’s son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue (“Nguema”)], “the minister of forestry and agriculture of Equatorial Guinea, a poor African nation [with recent oil discoveries!], made all of these purchases on an annual government salary of about $81,000.” The Post.

The U.S. government, which has the right to seize the fruits of a corrupt government parked in the United States, has been investigating this rather obvious accumulation of an estimated $70 million of purloined assets for five years now... and is still investigating. Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is also still in office, and his and Nguema’s spokespeople deny any wrong-doing. Teodorin, his over-the-top-spending “other” son, has also been a gentleman whose spending habits caught the attention of watch-groups and governments alike. “[In late September], French investigators seized millions of dollars' worth of sports cars belonging to Teodorin Nguema Obiang, the son of the country's long-ruling dictator.” ForeignPolicy.com, October 13^th. Apparently, there are plans for a $360 million mega-yacht in the offing as well.

“This [October] — seven years after the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations exposed the Obiang family’s secret accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington and five years after nonprofit Global Witness discovered his Malibu mansion purchase — the Justice Department went to court to seize $70 million of Nguema’s assets... U.S. government lawyers said his wealth was ‘inconsistent with his salary’ and the purchases were the result of plundering the nation’s natural gas and oil reserves.” [Duh-oh!] The United States has weathered criticism for the pace of its search for assets belonging to the families of the deposed dictators of the Arab Spring, such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

“In an interview in Cairo last month, Hasham Gaafar, a senior attorney in the Egyptian prosecutor’s office, said Swiss and British authorities have been more responsive to Egypt’s request to freeze and seize assets of former president Hosni Mubarak. [But] Gaafar said U.S. officials ‘are not meeting our expectations.’... Justice Department officials are quick to note that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. created the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative just this year, assigning about five full-time attorneys to manage cases.” The Post.

Why does it take so damned long? “‘It is one thing to say someone has a lot of money and is a corrupt leader; it is another thing to prove that money resulted from the corruption,’ said [Jennifer Shasky Calvery, chief of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section], a criminal division veteran who first gained fame as an All-American basketball star at George Washington University... On the investigative side, the kleptocracy lawyers have access to one full-time staffer and about 10 investigators on the Department of Homeland Security’s eight-year-old foreign corrupt investigations group based in Miami, said John F. Tobon, chief of the illicit finance and proceeds-of-crime unit...The workload is increasing.

“Investigators are working about 80 foreign and domestic cases involving kleptocracy, Tobon said... Many investigations cannot get off the ground without a request for “mutual legal assistance” from the country where the graft originally occurred, said Emil van der Does de Willebois, senior financial specialist for the Stolen Foreign Asset Recovery initiative of the World Bank and the United Nations. In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, for example, the countries began searching for stolen assets only after the fall of their longtime leaders. For Equatorial Guinea, the investigation began in the United States, since Obiang has remained in power after more than three decades.” The Post. “Mommy, I want to be a dictator when I grow up.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and bottom-line, we need to accelerate such enforcement efforts... and be very sympathetic when the populations of impoverished nations are furious at American support of... and frequent inaction regarding... these kleptocratic dictators around the globe.