Following the exposure of Belgium’s mishandling of Muammar Gaddafi’s frozen funds, it turns out that the British government has been collecting taxes on the former head of state’s blocked UK assets. British and US lawmakers have discussed the legality of London’s move and shared prognoses on whether the money will ever be returned to the Libyans.
Neither the late Muammar Gaddafi nor the citizens of Libya have access to the whopping £12 billion in assets the former head of state had in the UK, but Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has collected around £17 million in taxes on the assets since 2016, according to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee’s latest report.
The disclosure has prompted some British lawmakers to demand that London use the money earned in interest on the frozen accounts to compensate the victims of the Irish Republican Army (IRA); the organisation was supplied with weapons and explosives by the Gaddafi government in the 1980s.
The question then arises: it is legal to take money in taxes from the frozen assets of another state?
‘Nothing But Old-Fashioned Bank Robbery’
Kovalik underscored that it is up to the government of Libya how the dividends from the frozen assets should be distributed.
According to the lawyer, it would be legitimate if the Libyan authorities sued the British government in court to get their money back. However, he expressed doubt that it would happen anytime soon, since Libya has been left without a unified national government.
It is not the first time that Gaddafi’s frozen assets have been mishandled. In autumn 2018, the Belgium government was accused of paying out interest and dividends on the colonel’s bank accounts. Following Gaddafi’s death in 2011, about 16 billion euros belonging to the colonel were frozen in four Belgian banks in accordance with a UN resolution. However, an investigation conducted by Politico magazine indicated “regular outflows of stock dividends, bond income and interest payments to unknown beneficiaries with bank accounts in Luxembourg and Bahrain” between 2011 and 2017.
“I think that the problem is that there is no true rule of international law,” said Kovalik, commenting on the Belgian case. “The way the world works is the more powerful countries get what they want by force or other ways. Look at Western Europe: it was all built on the backs of people from the poor countries with their resources. The museums in Western Europe hauled all the antiquities of peoples in Africa, the Middle East, everything has been stolen there is nothing new.”
‘Law Has Nothing to Do With It’
Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, echoed Kovalik’s concerns by saying that Washington and NATO member states “have been stealing Libyan assets and oil anywhere and wherever they can since they murdered Gaddafi”. According to him, “law has nothing to do with it except for being window-dressing for their thievery”….
