Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/376810
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2014 News 11 nearly got me abducted it up to allege that Malta was being reticent in giving the money back," Kablan says, annoyed at a recent exposé on Libya's asset recovery ef- forts that gave him and Malta short shrift, if not sheer misrepresenta- tion. In 'How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy', Bloomberg claimed Gaddafi's son Mutassim had €100 million in Mal- tese accounts, and suggested that the country was being difficult in letting the cash go. It then alleged that Kablan was only picked by Zei- dan for being the son-in-law of for- eign minister Mohammed Abdelaziz – but Kablan is not even married, nor is he dating Abdelaziz's daugh- ter. And it poured a dark shadow on him by saying that he had worked for Exante, a finance firm in Malta that also acts as a broker for Bit- coin, "the virtual currency favoured by drug dealers and money launder- ers." "Zeidan simply wanted to appoint an independent person of integrity with proven technical competence to help Libya recover its money. I accepted this challenging appoint- ment not solely for professional reasons but also because I wished to offer my skills for the reconstruc- tion of the country of my father and forefathers after the turmoil it went through during the 2011 revolu- tion. "Obviously somebody has it in for me because I had the Wall Street Journal and a French news- paper enquire with me on the same allegations – Bloomberg just went ahead and published it. And this is what gets me, because having lived in Malta all my life I had no po- litical allegiances, no agenda, and I was conscious of the fact that Libya should not send shockwaves to the European banking system by draining the cash out in one fell swoop. While the Gaddafi mansion in London perhaps symbolises the Libyan effort in tracking down its diverted funds, Kablan says that "nobody really knows" what could be out there in financial deriva- tives, futures and foreign invest- ments. "You need computer intel- ligence to track it down." When Zeidan set up the TARSB in August 2013 to hunt down the assets held by Libya's sovereign funds, such as the Libyan Invest- ment Authority (LIA) and LAFI- CO, cooperation was already un- derway with Interpol, the World Bank, France and Britain, and the United States' attorney general. Eventually the TARSB was be- sieged by internal politics: the LIA was intent on recovering the hidden assets itself, while anoth- er unit called the Asset Recov- ery Committee (ARC) appointed by former prime minister Abdul Rahim Al Keeb, wanted to re- cover the assets itself. If there's an idea of the kind of governance basket-case that made Libya dysfunctional from day one of TNC rule, it's the cash payouts of $2,400 to every family from the national treasury, an outlay of bil- lions that soon became the order of the day: militiamen would walk into ministries demanding cash, an enduring image being the kid- napping of Ali Zeidan himself. The other fatal error for Libya was the inability to get rebels to hand in their weapons, with militias stop- ping everyone in the street and asking for identification. Kablan, in the meantime, had packed his bags in January 2014: an abduction attempt right in broad daylight meant that Tripoli was not safe for him. It's an ordeal that weighs heavily on him. Much of the old Libya under Gaddafi, the stunted and topsy- turvy bureaucracy, and the vio- lence that became the order of the day, was enough to spit out some- one like Kablan. "You have a country that's been relatively closed off for decades, and suspicious of outside influ- ence. There is a culture of exclu- sion that is not ready for certain people. It's sad really, I would have loved to see the country flourish." 'Ali Zeidan simply wanted to appoint an independent person of integrity with proven technical competence to help Libya recover its money.' Abdalla Kablan is a 30 year old computational finance expert with a PhD degree in Computational Finance from University of Essex, UK. A published academic in the area of computational finance and a practitioner too, Kablan specialises in an interdisciplinary field that utilizes different advanced techniques such as computer science, analytics, data analysis, forensic modelling, and quantitative mathematics for different applications ranging from financial investments to the tracing of the life cycle of capital in order to anticipate and forecast different movements in assets or capital. He has an extensive academic research publications track record in the areas of algorithmic trading, computational intelligence, Machine Learning, and Finance with renowned academic journals, many of which won research awards. Kablan also has an MSc in Financial Engineering and Knowledge Management from the University of Bradford, UK, and a Bsc I.T degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Malta. ABDALLA KABLAN 'There is a culture of exclusion that is not ready for certain people. It's sad really, I would have loved to see the country flourish.'