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French police have located a small portion of Muammar Gaddafi’s 160-160 million ransom, money stolen in 2017 from a Libyan bank, and arrested a couple who planned to sell damaged banknotes, a police source said today.
The story, revealed by the newspaper Le Parisien, seems incredible.
For unknown reasons, in 2019 the then Libyan government requested that the Central Bank of Germany send it several million euros in 100 and 200 banknotes. The money was deposited in a bank in Benghazi, in eastern Libya.
However, in early 2017, in the midst of the civil war, General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army seized the treasure: it was a total of 160 million euros and 1-2 million dollars.
Half of the euro amount was well preserved, but the remaining banknotes, which had been in the water for a long time, were half damaged, according to a source close to the investigation.
The Libyan National Army spent the 80 million that were in good condition to buy weapons and other equipment. The rest were in bad shape: they had been cleaned with detergent, they could not be used, yet they were still real bills.
In the summer of 2018, the European Central Bank is informed that some of these banknotes have returned to Europe. 90% of them were trafficked by the Turkish community and more specifically, the Turkish mafia, according to a police source.
The former were found in the possession of workers from Maghreb countries, who wanted to exchange them for new ones. They were paid by Turkish subcontractors.
Too many banknotes of this type are beginning to circulate on the European market. It raises an alarm, the UN is launching an investigation and the ECB is asking in early 2020 to no longer accept these banknotes, the serial numbers of which it has registered.
Around this time, the French police discovered a branch of the case in Limoges, in central France: a couple working in the markets and supplied by Turkey. They bought the banknotes at 50-75% of their face value, depending on their situation, and put them on the market or resold them in Belgium.
At the beginning of 2020, the man was arrested by the Belgian police, in possession of 15,000 euros in said banknotes. At that time, however, the ECB had not yet issued its directive, so the matter was not investigated further.
In total, the couple, which is being processed for money laundering, would have thrown 40,000 euros on the market.
The authorities estimate that these bills will continue to appear around the world for years to come. They also believe that many millions of this treasure are still in Turkey.
Source: ΑΠΕ – ΜΠΕ
