“This is a victory for the rule of law. The sanctions were unjustified from the beginning,” Zarti said in a statement read by a spokesman in Vienna, where the money manager headed in February in a break with Libya’s ruling elite.
He renewed his accusation that Austria’s foreign ministry had decided to slap sanctions on him solely based on media reports falsely portraying him as Qaddafi’s money man.
A notice in the European Union’s official journal said that “in view of the developments in Libya” Zarti had been removed from the blacklist of people and organizations whose assets were frozen because of suspected links to Qaddafi.
“He can do anything he wants with his money from today onwards,” said a spokesman for the Austrian National Bank, whose freeze of Zarti’s funds in March preceded the EU’s move by days.
At the time Austria called Zarti a “close confidant of the regime in Libya,” where Qaddafi is fighting a bloody revolt against four decades of authoritarian rule.
Zarti has said he resigned on Feb. 24 from the Libya Investment Authority (LIA) wealth fund, three days after coming to Austria to spend a holiday break with his family.
Zarti, who has an Austrian passport and lived for years in Vienna as a youth, has denied any links to the Libyan leader’s clan other than Qaddafi’s son Saif Al-Islam.
The European Union subsequently added the LIA — a $65 billion fund set up to invest Libya’s vast energy revenue — and several other financial organizations to its sanctions list.
Austria froze around 1.2 billion euros ($1.7 billion) in funds it thought linked to Qaddafi’s associates.
