TRIPOLI, 16 December 2004 — The Libyan Central Bank has withdrawn $1 billion of assets which had been frozen for almost two decades in the United States on Washington’s orders, a Libyan central bank official said yesterday.
The move follows the ending of a broad US trade embargo in September by US President George W. Bush to reward Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi for giving up weapons of mass destruction.
The previously frozen assets, which have been invested in various countries, are believed to include equity holdings in banks. The original size of the funds was about $400 million, Central Bank Vice-President Farhat Omar Ben Gdara told Reuters. “This (transfer) process was completed within the last two weeks,” he said.
The US embargo, which began in 1986, was lifted after Tripoli renounced weapons of mass destruction a year ago and paid a total of about $2.7 billion, or $10 million per victim, in compensation for the 1988 Pan Am airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Bankers from the two countries have this year been discussing ways to unfreeze these assets.
“This process does not mean we severed our relations with the banks in the United States,” Ben Gdara said. “We are in the process of opening accounts in banks in the United States.”
