Gadaffi's Gold - Dead men tell no tales

Gadaffi’s gold-dead men tell no tales?

What happened to Gadaffi’s gold  is a question commonly posed by the lunatic fringe of the internet and comes from those who are still looking for Elvis Presley or the Russian Czarina. And yet from what is now becoming publicly known, the question of what happened to an estimated 143 tonnes of gold that was held by the former Libyan dictator Muamar Gadaffi prior to a very violent and unceremonious death at the hands of his opponents in 2011 is now far more credible. The question was commonly dismissed as even the UN Security Council’s team of experts who were looking for Gadaffi’s missing wealth had not commented on the missing gold and silver stock estimated to be worth some $7 billion at the time.

It was not until the infamous WikiLeaks of Hilary Clinton’s E mail on Libya that some understanding of the whole issue of Libyan gold became clearer. (See Hillary Clinton Email Archive:  France's Client & Qaddafi's Gold. from: http://archive.is/pBkCO#selection-1097.0-1097.32)  The E mails dating from 2011 purported to explain the French motivation for leading the bombardment of Libya. In the E mail Clinton suggested that the French motivation was principally, though not entirely to stop Gadhafi from using his gold stock to give the West and Central African states a new currency that would be based on the Libyan golden dinar and to end the economic domination of Africa by France. And so Clinton’s Email concluded that according to reliable French sources Sarkozy’s motivation for entering the war stemmed from:

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his internal political situation in France,

d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its                     position in the world.

e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term                      plans to supplant France as the dominant power in, Francophone                    Africa.

There was much in the Clinton Email that was questionable including the fact that the gold and silver were supposedly held in the vaults of the Central Bank of Libya in early 2011. This may have been correct but they were certainly not part of the country’s official reserves at least according to the IMF. According to IMF and World Gold Council data, the Central Bank of Libya only sold 27 tonnes of gold in 2011 and has sold nothing thereafter. But now Libya has two central banks and it is difficult to know who exactly the international community is dealing with.

All of this could have been dismissed as just so much internet gibberish pitched to those at  the lowest intellectual level. But fast forward to 2017 and then suddenly the question of what happened to Ghadaffi’s apparent gold holdings suddenly became more credible. According to the United Arab Emirates trade statistics in 2016 Libya had exported some 81 tonnes of gold to the UAE i.e. Dubai and over the period  between the revolution which overthrew Ghadaffi, the country had exported some 171 tonnes from 2012 to 2016. 198 if you include the official 27 – which it may be safe to say did not go to the UAE  

 In 2016 the volume of gold exports from Libya made it the single largest source of African gold to the UAE, larger than Sudan or Ghana or any of the more traditional gold producing countries in Africa. Libyan exports constituted some 9% of Dubai’s gold supply in 2016. In 2016, the UAE reportedly imported 446 tonnes of gold from Africa, much of it being smuggled from the tens of thousands of small scale gold miners throughout the continent.

What makes the figure odd, to be polite, is the fact that Libya mines almost no gold to speak of. According to both the US and British Geological Surveys, which are amongst the most authoritative sources,  Libya is not a gold producer which would be of no surprise to anyone as Libya was and remains known only for its massive oil exports.

The obvious question is then where did 171 tonnes of gold exports between 2011 and 2016 come from if not from Libyan mines? There are several obvious and quite legitimate explanations. First is the fact that many Libyans during the Gadaffi period held gold as ‘drop dead money’ either in the form of golden dinars or gold ingots. As Libya slid into civil war and complete chaos following Gadaffi’s death in 2011 many Libyans no doubt liquidated their gold holdings just to survive. Another important source of Libya’s gold exports could be from either Darfur and Sudan in general or from the other West African countries. As Libya became a failed state following the Anglo-French intervention and a major entrepôt for human smugglers, gold from sub-Saharan Africa and Sudan was commonly used to pay the cost of the traffickers from West Africa. Africans trying to escape war or grinding poverty would commonly join the estimated 10 million Africans working in small scale gold mines to earn enough to pay for their transit to Italy.

But it seems unlikely that these two ‘legitimate’ sources could conceivably amount to171 tonnes of gold over 5 years and hence the third source  seems more credible -that much of Gadaffi’s gold ended up captured by the one of other Libyan ‘governments’ or war lords and exported to UAE to fund on-going activities. This then returns us to the question of why Sarkozy actually bombed Libya and had Gadaffi eliminated. In 2018 new information arose when a French investigative magistrate indicted Sarkozy for election financing improprieties when his election team  received some Euro 50 million from Gadaffi to fund his 2007 election.  What was the motivation for the French led intervention into the 2011 Libyan war which has resulted in yet another failed state? So did the motivation  stem from high international policy as suggested in Hilary Clinton’s leaked Email or from the eternal verity that dead men tell no tales?

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM where he is employed.