Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/376810
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2014 10 News Serving Libya nearly Abdalla Kablan tells MATTHEW VELLA how, after being chosen to head Libya's billion- dollar hunt for sovereign wealth hidden around the world by Muammar Gaddafi, he found a government besieged by internal rivalries and misguided policies. IN January 2014, the 30-year-old Abdalla Kablan – an academic at the University of Malta who speaks fluent Maltese and who has lived most of his life here – survived an abduction attempt in Tripoli, where he was staying on official duty at the behest of Libyan prime minister Ali Zeidan. Today, seated inside his univer- sity office, Kablan is at pains in re- counting this ordeal. He demands that this episode in his life is not repeated anywhere, particularly since it could affect those close to him. As he recalls the event that sent him packing from the Libyan capital, Kablan is visibly in disqui- etude. The brief chapter in Kablan's life that nearly cost him his life hap- pened towards the end of 2013, when Zeidan – today no longer prime minister, and now living in Geneva – found the Libyan PhD, a computational finance expert, in Malta, and asked him to lead an official, government campaign to track down and recover billions in cash that deposed dictator Mua- mmar Gaddafi had stashed away through vehicles like the Libyan Investment Authority. "It was a mess, to say the least. I know that various government ministers and other leaders in the Transitional National Coun- cil, had issued some 20 mandates to various people to recover al- leged assets and monies owned by the Gaddafis, on 10% com- missions. "It was simply anyone: pri- vate detectives, journal- ists, or simply people who claimed that they knew that Gaddafi had some money in Switzerland, for exam- ple. You would just go up to the minister, and he gives you a mandate to go and demand the cash. But which gov- ernment is going to trust any Tom, Dick and Harry who comes knocking on their door demanding the return of Libyan money?" Kablan scoffs at little victories like the £10 million London house, previously belonging to Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saadi Gaddafi, that the High Court in London returned to the Libyan state. "I told them that a cen- tral, government-man- dated authority had to deal with govern- ment authorities and financial i n s t i t u t i o n s , " Kablan said, when he was discov- ered by Zeidan, who had learnt that the widely-published academic was living in Malta. Kablan gave a presenta- tion of how a central authority could em- ploy computer science and quan- titative math- ematics to track down financial i n v e s t m e n t s and the life cycle of capital. "I have an extensive academic research track record in algorith- mic trading, computational intelli- gence, machine learning, and finance with re- nowned academic journals, many of which won re- search awards. My plan was to have a govern- ment office that would be the offi- cial author- ity to go to other gov- e r n m e n t s and banks, or attorneys general, to get the cash back. And not with some promise of 1 0 % commission on the booty. "Malta – and I have to say here that it has been one government that truly supported Libyan aspi- rations – was ready to cooperate, but it couldn't just give out Libyan cash to someone claiming to have a mandate from a minister." In Kablan, Zeidan found a profes- sional interlocutor who also could handle the computational foren- sics, data mining, and asset identi- fication. But the minute he set up Tracing & Asset-Recovery Support Bureau (TARSB), Kablan ran into difficulty. "As soon as I was appointed, the commissions and the mandates stopped, and that made many people unhappy. I was seen as an upstart, a young arriviste flown in from Malta. I was hated," Kablan says. His plan – never to reach fruition – was first to establish links with in- ternational organisations, Interpol, and the UN-World Bank's Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR). StAR's most important role is fostering ties between countries seeking looted money and those sitting on it: at the very basic level, fixing meetings between police and f i n a n c i a l - i n t e l l i - gence experts. Countries like Britain had formed task forces to work with Egypt; the United States' Department of Justice has a "klep- tocracy" unit, the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, to provide legal and policy assistance to foreign governments. The sec- ond stage would be an "in-reach" campaign – basically foster ties with Libya's own institutions, such as the banks, the Central Bank, and the Libyan investment entities, to be able to check data, transfers and investments. In the third stage, Kablan's office would have started trawling the web, using artificial intelligence for an in-house exercise to effec- tively track down the money. The problem was that there was nothing taking root. "I didn't even have a desk, let alone an office. All I had was a plan of action. I didn't get paid, and I funded my own air fare!" Kablan laughs. "The reality was that I was faced with a culture shock. Things got done slow in Tripoli, something totally different from the way we do things here. Everything was transitional, but it could have been handled better." Kablan says he was frustrated by the inability to actually turn the TARSB into a central authority. "Malta was ready to transfer €100 million in Libyan funds. But that's a big responsibility. If anything, Malta was keeping the Libyan peo- ple's interests at heart by not just dishing out to anyone. Malta was confused: 'how do we give it you,' it asked the government? "Being Maltese myself, I knew that people here were willing to give the money back. I cannot un- derstand how Bloomberg thought 'As soon as I was appointed, the commissions and the mandates stopped, and that made many people unhappy. I was seen as an upstart, a young arriviste flown in from Malta. I was hated.'