The plunder of the century: the assault of the “volonteers” on Libyan SWFs

by Manlio Dinucci *

Manlio Dinucci returns on items noted in our columns at the outset of the war in Libya: colonial  "volunteer"powers have taken over the huge state investments made by Libya abroad. The money frozen in Western banks threatened the monopoly of the World Bank and IMF in financing development projects in the Third World. It continues to "work" (no more in the form of investment but  now of bank guarantees), this time in favor of Westerners.

Libyan Central Bank

The objective of the war in Libya is not just oil, whose reserves (estimated at 60 billion barrels) are the largest in Africa and extraction costs among the lowest in the world, nor the natural gas reserves which are estimated at about 1 500 billion m3. In the viewfinder of the volunteers' Libyan operation there are sovereign wealth funds, money that the state of Libya has invested abroad.

Sovereign wealth funds managed by the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) is estimated at approximately $ 70 billion, climbing to over 150 if you include foreign investments of the Central Bank and other agencies. And they could be even greater. Even if they are lower than those of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, Libyan sovereign funds are characterized by their rapid growth. When the LIA was established in 2006, it had 40 billion. In five short years, she has made investments in over one hundred companies in North African, Asian, European, North American and South American: holding, banking, real estate, industry, oil companies and others.

Italy's principal investments are those made in Libyan UniCredit Banca (including Lia and the Central Bank of Libya have 7.5%) in Finmeccanica (2%) and Eni (1%): These investments and others (including 7, 5% Juventus Football Club) have less economic significance (they amount to about $ 4 billion) than politics.

Libya, after Washington had removed it from its proscription list of "rogue states", tried to rebuild a place at the international level by focusing on the "diplomacy of SWFs”. When the United States and the European Union lifted the embargo of 2004 and the major oil companies  returned to the country, Tripoli was able to have a trade surplus of about $ 30 billion annually largely allocated to foreign investment. The management of SWFs but created a new mechanism of power and corruption at the hands of ministers and senior officials, which probably escaped the control of Qaddafi himself confirmed by the fact that in 2009, he proposed than 30 billion oil dividends go "directly to the Libyan people." This has accentuated the fractures inside the Libyan government.

It is on these fractures that  the U.S. and European ruling circles have put pressure, circles  who, before the military attack on Libya to take over its energy wealth, have taken over the Libyan sovereign wealth funds. This operation was supported by the very representative of the  Libyan Investment Authority, Mohamed Layas: as revealed in a diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks, on January 20 Layas informed the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli that the LIA had filed $ 32 billion in U.S. banks. Five weeks later, on February 28, the U.S. Treasury had "frozen" the assets. According to official statements, is "the largest sum of money ever blocked in the U.S.,", money that Washington keeps  "in trust for the future of Libya." It could actually be  an injection of capital into the ever more indebted  U.S. economy. A few days later, the EU had "frozen" around 45 billion euros of Libyan funds.

The attack on Libyan funds will have a particularly strong impact on Africa. Here, the Libyan Arab African Investment Company has made investments in over 25 countries, including 22 in sub-Saharan Africa, while scheduling  to increase investments in the next five years, especially in mining, manufacturing, tourism and telecommunications. Libyan investments have been decisive in achieving the first telecommunications satellite from the Rascom (Regional African Satellite Communications Organization), which went into orbit in August 2010, and allows African countries to begin to become independent of U.S. and European satellite networks, thus achieving annual savings of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even more important were the Libyan investments in realising the three financial institutions launched by the African Union: African Investment Bank, headquartered in Tripoli, the African Monetary Fund, based in Yaoundé (Cameroon); Bank Central Africa, based in Abuja (Nigeria). The development of these bodies would enable African countries to escape the control of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both instruments of neo-colonial domination, and would mark the end of the CFA franc, the currency that 14 former French colonies are obliged to use. The freezing of Libyan funds dealt a heavy blow to the whole project. The weapons used by the "volunteers" are not only those of the Libyan military operation. 

(Translated from French)
Original article : http://www.voltairenet.org/article169542.html
by Manlio Dinucci
Geographer and geo-political scientist.

On Gbagbo, Ivory Coast and allassane

The only struggle against Gbagbo is that of shameless imperialists to secure resources and influence in west africa.
Now, people who hadn't heard about Gbagbo a year earlier are suddenly turning into Ivory Coast specialists and anti-Gbagbo pundits.
Fed by the uncritical media they believe they know what is going on.
Uncritical of what they are being fed as information they make un-, worse, mis-informed comments.
They talk of an international community that thinks like them and brandish their numbers as a proof of their being right.
The number of people saying something does not make it true.
In medieval times, intellectuals said that the earth was flat. They were wrong.
Today, very knowledgeable people are succumbing to emotions and sensationalism thereby not being objective when it comes to Ivory COast and Gbagbo.
I suspect the fact that Allassane studied in the US is the reason why so many Americans back him.
Moreover, socialism has never been a political philosophy of choice in the states. It is that of Gbagbo...
The UN and ECOWAS are not independent bodies.
Those speaking African countries there, for the most part, depend on aid from the members of the permanent security council.
They are not independent and are mere parrots when it comes to opinion.
In that international community, and in the security council, is France which definitely has economical and political interest in Ivory Coast. Those interest are of an imperialist nature, like it or not.
Allassane is liked because he belongs to the system (IMF, World bank, France, etc...) and has religiously applied their measure in Ivory Coast in the past when being the prime minister of a corrupt and dictatorial regime (in the 90s). He is docile. He executes, no question asked. A good slave.
Gbagbo is a bit more of a problem. He has views of his own. He thinks that imperialism is still a fact, how funny you will say. The fact is a significant portion of the Ivory Coast population thinks like him. This makes it difficult to take him out.
Obviously he can be treated as a Mugabe... that is demonized. Let's kill his legacy they must have said.
The fact is it will be difficult to turn him into a West African Mugabe. He is more adept at politics than Mugabe.
He's been doing it since before Allassane was collaborating with a dictatorial regime. Allassane is a relative new comer on the political scene. He is naive.
He believes that support from the US or France is enough for him to win the Ivorians hearts. He is sadly mistaken.
Times have changed and it's no longer sufficient to be friends with Paris to lead Ivory Coast.
If there's one thing that Gbagbo has done it's this one: show the Ivorians that there is life after France.
Let's salute him for that.