What’s a Dictator to Do?

Dictators who lose access to their more direct accounts and/or the national treasury – either because they are vamoosing in search of a safe haven or because the rest of the world has seized their assets, boycotted their country but buying all those munitions and paying troops to “kill the rebels” takes cash – need “alternatives.” The Sunday March 13^th New York Times took a look at where recent absconding or malingering dictators probably “stashed the cash”:

· Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has stashed away tens of billions of do llars in cash in United States dollars, Libyan dinars and possibly other currencies in banks and in Bab Al Azizia, his Tripoli compound.

· The former Philippine first lady, Imelda R. Marcos, and her three children were charged with removing 22 crates of Philippine pesos from the country when they fled to Hawaii in 1986.

· In Haiti, President Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michele, withdrew at least $33 million from the country’s central bank, transferring it to foreign accounts, and may have stored some money and jewelry in a safe-deposit box at a Citibank branch on Madison Avenue in Manhattan…

· The Panamanian dictator, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, was reported to have stashed $5.8 million in denominations of 10s, 20s, 50s and 100s in a file cabinet behind a desk at his home. United States authorities seized the money during the invasion of Panama in 1989.

· In 1997, shortly before the forces of Laurent Kabila took power in Congo, formerly called Zaire, aides close to former President Mobutu Sese Seko smuggled crates of diamonds and more than $40 million in cash out of the country on a jet chartered by the South African government…

· [I]n 2003, in the hours before American bombs began falling on Baghdad, one of President Saddam Hussein’s sons, Qusay Saddam Hussein, was said by officials to carry off nearly $1 billion in cash from the vaults of the country’s Central Bank… The volume of cash was so great — some $900 million in American $100 bills and as much as $100 milli on worth of euros — that a team of workers took two hours to load the money on three tractor-trailers.

Indeed, Swiss bankers were used to laughing on the way to their own vaults so much, but that was before the IRS got dem yodeling bankers to pony up some info on income tax evaders: “UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed [in February of 2009] to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities.” NY Times, Feb. 18, 2009.

So in the last couple of years, banks in Singapore and Hong Kong have figured out how to create enough true secrecy to attract dictator-dough in days where even the Swiss could no longer be trusted to hide ill-gotten gains and illicit accounts. Think of the world leaders who are still in power who are rich beyond rich? Think that they keep that cash in their local checking account?!

I’m Peter Dekom, and what was that song again? “Only the Good Die Young”?