Muammar Gaddafi may have died the richest person on earth, with more than $200bn in assets sneaked out of Africa's most oil-rich nation.

  • Snig

    Another of the sainted job creators. 

  • funkioto

    sneaked? ok maybe but it sounds funny :)

  • http://www.cekmagdurlari.com/ Cüneyt

    Once the rebels representing the various anti-Qaddafi tribes get their hands on the money the real fight for Libya will start.Swiss banks must be getting ready to open the new numbered acoounts.

  • EvilCatBucky

    Remember the “good ‘ol days” when wealth like that could protect you from anything?
    Hopefully it’s a lesson that more are about to learn.

    • Guido

      Sadly, it still could. He just made some really dumb choices. Had he left Lybia and he would be doing well, cozy and pampered in an island.

      • teapot

        He was offered asylum in more than a dozen African states, on top of Venezuela. He was just a delusional idiot who sealed his fate with his own stubbornness. That or he generated so much fear in those around him that they became yes-men and fed him what he wanted to hear.

  • http://jxc.ca/ Jon 丘

    Marcos and Ceausescu COMBO BONUS.

  • soylent_plaid

    Whereas I don’t wish death (or a fatal mob beating/shooting) on anyone, sometimes it’s not always sad when someone dies.  Now the redistribution game begins.  Will it be an equitable sharing of the wealth, a massive investment in infrastructure, public works and the economy, or yet another cash grab?

    • HeartsinaBox

      >Now the redistribution game begins

      Some facts unknown to some of Qaddafi’s Libya

      Electricity consumption in homes Free
      Water consumption in homes Free
      Price of a liter of gasoline only 0.08 Euros
      Citizen does not pay any tax. And drawing on the added value that is not completely
      Libya occupies the last rank among the countries that have debt
      Purchase price of cars in Libya is the same as the purchase price of the factories
      Every student wants to complete his studies abroad, the government has paid 1627 Euros per month.
      Each student gets a college degree gets a salary, even without the work!
      Each family gets a Libyan registered on 300 Euros a month!

      • spejic

        And yet the people that were supposedly benefiting from this largess  were quite happy to see Gaddafi dead. Maybe this often-repeated Internet factoid is actually saying the opposite of what you think it does.

      • onereader

        Could we please stop with this crap? You’re like the morons who circulate those emails about secret Muslims and 9/11 conspiracies.

        Libya was a place where the secret police could bust in your home at any time and disappear you indefinitely, where families sent packages to jailed relatives only to discover that they had been secretly killed years before, and where nobody had rights, but the right to praise the Brother Leaders and the right to look for a powerful patron who could guarantee a minimum of those supposedly free services.

        A colleague of mine went there in vacation 3 years ago, in a country who made billions of dollars in oil you could find dirt roads and open air sewers just 10 km from the center of Tripoli, all of this while the Gaddafi family and the inner regime bosses blew millions in luxuries, drugs, women and parties all around the world.

        • teapot

          Thank you for saving me time.

          Why is there so much noise from people about Gaddafi’s rights being abused? This guy was an evil fuck who killed dissenters (or just whoever) and whose stubbornness to admit defeat resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of his countrymen. If the people jumping to the defence of Gaddafi had seen video of even 0.01% of what this scumbag ordered throughout his life then the video of the mob bashing him would seem like a little girl’s princess-themed birthday party.

          Some people waive their rights through a life of evil deeds and who are we to say how the Libyan people should punish such people? It was their revolution and it is their choice how to deal with a guy who seriously had it coming.

          • Øyvind

            Did Gaddafi get what he deserved? Probably. But who are we to say how they treat him? Well, ‘we’ are the world society. The ones who have  accepted the rules of war (which also applies to Libya’s civil war, I assume). You don’t just kill a prisoner without a legal sanction. That would be a war crime. And while it might be deserved, it’s not a good way to begin the foundation of a new Libya, one that hopefully will follow different rules that Gaddafi’s.
            If you rationalize an act with ‘he did it, so we can do it too’, then you are not much better than the evil you are replacing.

          • teapot

            There are no such rules of war when the people of a nation have to take up arms (at great personal cost) against a man who had an army and a lot of military arsenal at his disposal. Rules of war apply to armies. Rebels by definition answer to no formal authority because what they are doing is against the laws of the country in which they fight.

            You cannot control emotion and you cannot control mob mentality and anyone who physically tried to protect Gaddafi would’ve been killed themselves as a loyalist. If you watch a subtitled version of the “mob” video allegedly at least one person in the mob said “We need him alive”. I’m not arguing that death before trial is the neatest or most ethical way of dealing with things, I’m just saying that when you push people enough there is no telling what they will do when they finally get their hands on you. 

            I saw an interview with a Libyan guy in Tripoli after Gaddafi ate it. He said that he lost two brothers in the battle for freedom and when asked by the reporter if that price was worth getting rid of Gaddafi he said “absolutely”. If anyone killed two of my siblings they would be lucky to live much longer than a week.

          • Øyvind

            I agree with most of what you say, but not entirely with the first paragraph. If it had been a mob in its most basic form, I’d agree with you that all bets are off, and rules of war don’t apply. But that hasn’t really been the case in Libya for several month. The rebellion has been (at least in some way) controlled by the National Transitional Council for several months, and given the rebellion both organization and a political face and received some international legitimacy. It may not be a traditional army, but I’d say they are close enough to make it into a grey area, at best.
            As for mob mentality during his capture, I totally agree, it is probably close to impossible to control. That still doesn’t make it legitimate to just kill him.
            (Though I guess the jury is still out on the actual events; he might even have been killed by his own supporters)

          • teapot

            These guys were playing the role of soldiers but the large majority of them were never trained as such and would not have the composure in battle you would expect of a soldier. Even when they were taking Tripoli in August they were having major problems with firing at their own guys. I concur that trained soldiers would have been able to manage the pent-up anger of their comrades, but most of the people you see in the mob video were probably not soldiers 1 year ago and I think that is the distinction which made the event pan out the way it did.

            Re: him being shot in the head… I totally think that’s a story to make his brutal end seem potentially less brutal. Sorry for the Gore, but does this look like a man who has been shot in the head? Not to me.

            http://goo.gl/TTjXe (google shortened to avoid a thumbnail)

      • Øyvind

        Giving away free stuff is a carnival trick, not a way to run a country. It will at best make sure you have a complacent majority, decreasing the possibility of rebellion/opposition. If you noticed, during the peak of the Arab Spring, several of the leaders around the gulf (and let’s not kid anyone, they are all more or less dictatorships or totalitarian regimes) immediately responded by raising vages or giving away a cash amount to the general public. And it was done instead of making any political consession to the public; here, take this wad of cash and go home and be quiet, and we won’t mention it again.
        And to be fair, it is usually pretty effective. Iran, for instance, have had some minor demonstrations and riots over the years. But the major ones have been over things like a slight increase in gas prices, or the government failing to improve social promises, not so much over serious political issues (which, to be fair, would be pretty dangerous).
        My point being (I seem to have wandered a way off…) that appeasing the public by giving them a handout doesn’t mean you’re running a very good society.

    • atimoshenko

      Honestly, if every Libyan man, woman and child personally got handed $30k (which is what, I guess, the $200bn works out to), this would be by far the most positive and most economically efficient utilisation of the funds – it would let a thriving economy form grass-roots.

      • ackpht

        Mathematically sound, but utterly impossible if the redistribution is handled by humans. At the moment this wealth is very vulnerable to being looted by bankers, lawyers, politicians, normally-honest opportunists for whom the temptation is too great, and outright thieves- and much of it will be.

  • http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

    I don’t really get why he stayed in Libya. That amount of money could certainly have bought him safety elsewhere in the world. Was he really that stubborn? Maybe the country was that important to him.

    • http://twitter.com/Radlein Ray Radlein

      I think that the personality traits required to be an iron-fisted Dictator for Life are incompatible with “quitting while you’re ahead.”

      For instance, consider that, in the long history of the Roman Empire, only ONE Emperor ever RETIRED.

    • Mister44

      I imagine 1) he didn’t think he would really lose control that badly and 2) anywhere other than where he had loyalists meant he risked capture and being turned over either to the new Libyan gov, or some International Crime authority.

    • voiceinthedistance

      I believe the shortest answer for why he stayed in Libya is hubris.  His was reportedly quite tumescent.

  • phisrow

    Any word on who was more than happy to hold their nose and assist in socking away this little retirement fund(both the extraction industry creeps happy to turn resources into cash, and the finance weasels who know that money has no smell)?

    Honestly, now that Gaddafi is chilling in some nowhere mall, I’m downright cautious about any story about what “Gaddafi did” that doesn’t keep the focus straight on whoever helped him do it. Did he do it? Sure. Could he have done it alone? Hell no. Are his assistants, particularly the respectable western ones, almost certainly less dead than he is? Yup.

    It would be unfair to the historical record to minimize the actions of the dead; but counterproductive to justice to bury all the guilt with them…

  • http://twitter.com/spockosbrain Spocko

    Wasn’t there a Beatles’ song about this?

    • Snig

      Piggies?

  • Aaron Krowne

    This story is total BS.  Look halfway down, the paragraph says “while the accounts were in government ministry names, Ghaddafi or his family COULD have accessed them if they wanted them”.  Well then, that’s not quite the same as “stealing or looting”, is it?  It’s more like “maintaining control”.   I’m not sure how this distinguishes the accounts from any other state account or asset in a  dictatorship.  Come on.  This is a transparent attempt to inflate the figures to make the lynched Ghaddafi seem so outrageously evil that people will forget about the total lack of due process or respect for international law … or human rights.

  • Mister44

    Sounds like someone should have invested in a few HIND helicopters and a private island in the Mediterranean.

  • http://twitter.com/foniker Kenan Turnbull

    In this country people sneak away from their victims with enuff $$ to fill their crackpipe for another day. dagoofy cud have snuck away w/enuff to buy his own country & fill it w/hot cars & women & camel-jerky.  Th crackheads got away & he didnt. he had months to do it, the crackheads had minutes & seconds to get away. The crackheads r smokin their crack in the promised land and cadoofys crack is smokin in hell. How can he be so less smart than a crackhead?

    • Mister44

      What are you talking about? He had his own country – with  cars, women, and camels.

    • eviladrian

      So you’re saying I should sell my oil stocks and buy crack?

  • cstatman

    and with all that money,  Still Dead.   Maybe the really ultra-rich bankers, mergers and acquisition guys,  etc,   could learn a thing or two here….  

  • lukane

    I anticipate a whole bunch of spam mail from Mrs. Gaddafi.

  • Antinous / Moderator

    He still didn’t have as many shoes as Imelda Marcos.

    • Øyvind

      I think it is too early to say anything about his shoe collection. Remember, this was just about his abroad finances, they have yet to discover his overseas wardrobes. Shoes are easy to track in a desert state, but many of the placesGaddafi frequented probably had a lot of concrete/asphalt, which makes it hard to trace shoes, even for an experienced tracker.

  • shamocracy79

    Sometimes all is not as the MSM claims it to be, a comment from the original story linked sheds some light on what’s really happened in Libya if anyone is interested in doing some actual research.

    “What a joke of a spin-piece. Libya’s Central bank was Nationalized. One
    of the few non-corporate controlled central banks in the world.  Since
    it is world-wide colonial law that all oil producing nations sell oil
    for petro dollars or else, Libya had petrodollar based cash assets
    deposited all over the world as a diversified protection against bank
    collapses. Libya’s balance sheet  was in the black except for the fact
    that all the money they received from oil revenue was based upon the
    dollar which is a debt-based currency. Libya was trying to convert that
    debt-based currency issued by the US Federal Reserve and the associated
    private central banks of the IMF into positive valued assets. Gadaffi
    announced these very intentions to do so in a formal meeting before the
    IMF and his further intentions to use those assets toward forming the
    African Monetary Fund to directly compete with the IMF and THAT along
    with the also stated intention of selling Libyan oil for Libyan
    currency, a positive valued Dinar based on a gold standard, was what
    caused the ‘Humanitarian Mission’ that got him killed. Rather than
    allowing Libya to upset the international debt-based currency
    dynamic controled by  the privately held central banks Libya’s entire
    economy was destroyed.”

    Also anytime you try and associate a gang of mercenaries as the “voice of the people” you’re making yourself look foolish.  Next time you see the pictures and videos of those “happy Libyans” why not try and find a woman in the crowd as they are rarer than Waldo.  Why you ask?  Well it’s because the “Libyans” that are so happy aren’t the citizens of the cities they’re filmed cheering in, the citizens are mostly hiding so they don’t get found out as a “Gaddaffi supporter” and beaten/killed in the streets by the thugs and mercenaries who now control the country.  

    Lastly let us all not forget who a large portion of these mercenaries who acted as ground fodder for this “revolution” actually are, former Al-Qaeda fighters who were killing/maiming US troops in Afghanistan.  Of most interest is a West Point pdf article(http://tarpley.net/docs/CTCForeignFighter.19.Dec07.pdf) that goes into detail not only the amount of Al-Qaeda from Libya in Afghanistan, but the actual cities where the majority of those fighters came from.  Not surprisingly, the 2 top hometowns of Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan from Libya are the hometowns of where this Libyan “revolution” started, Benghazi and Darnah.

  • Guest

     I hope the Libyan people set an example for us to follow.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      I hope the Libyan people set an example for us to follow.

      So many possible meanings based on the implied tense of ‘set’.