Former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh looted the tiny West African nation of US$1 billion through fear and privilege during his 22 years in power, an amount more than 10 times higher than originally estimated by the new government, leaving the nation in lingering debt, according to a report on Wednesday by the investigative group Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Jammeh looted the money from state coffers, including the central bank, social welfare office and state telecom company, during his more than two decades in power, getting away with it by elevating civil servants to prominent positions and empowering a group of businesspeople led by a key Hezbollah financier, the group said.
The US$1 billion is believed to still support him in his exile in Equatorial Guinea, it added.
Meanwhile, the Gambia remains very poor with debt of US$489 million at the end of 2017, according to the World Bank.
The Gambia’s central bank also owes more than 130 percent of its GDP to lenders, according to the IMF.
Gambian President Adama Barrow, who beat Jammeh in 2016 elections, estimated that Jammeh stole about US$90 million.
There is an official commission of inquiry to look into the stolen funds.
The Gambian government has not yet commented on the report.
The project said that bank statements, contracts, government correspondence and internal reports show “a web of fraud that far exceeds the figure offered by Barrow.”
The money that was not funneled to presidential controlled bank accounts went to businesses that received lucrative contracts from the former leader, the group said.
He got away with it because the Gambia is small, with a population of about 2 million people, and remained relatively obscure, it said.
“He ran the country like an organized crime syndicate,” said Jeggan Grey-Johnson, a Gambian activist and communications officer at the African regional office of the Open Society Foundation.
Jammeh pillaged money through force, threatening those who dared to stand up to him, and setting up various accounts to hide the assets.
Former Gambian Central Bank governor Amadou Colley said that during testimony to a commission that Jammeh and his supporters exerted “significant control over the institution,” and often withdrew funds without proper paperwork, according to the report, which said he diverted more than US$71 million from the reserves in only a few years.
His methods of choice were to hijack the central bank’s accounts, create new accounts on which he or his supporters were the only signatories or he used accounts that had gone dormant.
Jammeh also found other techniques, gaining significant foreign aid in 1995 by recognizing Taiwan’s independence from China and having those funds funneled to him and other close associates, including a key financier for Hezbollah named Mohammed Bazzi, who was used as a middleman to invest money in the state-owned telecom company and who among others became a beneficiary, the report said.
“The true scale of Jammeh’s thefts from the central bank may never be fully known,” it said.
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