Biens mal acquis translates as "ill-gotten goods". It specifically means litigation working its way through French courts seeking repayment of monies looted from some very poor countries, especially in Françafrique, although related and similar cases have been filed in Spain, Switzerland and Monaco, and also against the Marcos family and the estate of longtime Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha as well.
Contents
- List of assets seized known incomplete
- Restitutions Made
- Spain
- France
- Monaco
- Switzerland
- Mobutu funds
- Duvalier funds
- References
The phrase is used in anti-corruption legal proceedings that seek restitution from former dictators and strongmen through the judicial systems of some former colonial powers, especially France. Recent legal decisions have seized assets from former politicians found to have misappropriated treasury funds while in power. Some assets have been returned in restitution to the governments of the countries they were stolen from. In other cases, judicial proceedings are still underway, or opposition groups have asked for the money to be returned in some other way to the country's people because a corrupt government is still in power. Sometimes this takes the form of a development project, with negotiated milestones for the release of funds.
Biens mal acquis refers to the French proverb: bien mal acquis ne profite jamais. (In English: "a thing dishonorably obtained never truly enriches.") In a March 2007 report, the Catholic Committee Against Hunger and for Development (CCFD) turned the proverb on its head for effect.
Titled Biens mal acquis... profitent trop souvent. La fortune des dictateurs et les complaisances occidentales, (or Ill-Gotten Goods... Too Often Do Benefit: Western Complacency and the Wealth of Dictators,) the report enumerates known instances of kleptocracy in African dictatorships such as Congo-Brazzaville, estimating that $100–180 billion in assets have been diverted by national leaders in recent decades. Mobutu Sese Seko for example, dictator of Zaïre from 1965 to his death in 1997, had homes in France and Switzerland, and a personal fortune of $5–6 billion when he died, but left his country with a public debt of $13 billion.
The Belgian Centre national de coopération au développement (CNCD), or National Center for Cooperation in Development, has defined biens mal acquis as a fixed or liquid asset or fund which may be misappropriated and illegally removed from the public heritage, and thereby impoverishing the state. Ill-gotten goods may result from tortious or criminal activity, which has enabled heads of state to enrich themselves far beyond the level their official incomes can explain. Ill-gotten goods may stem from embezzlement, theft, or the illicit transfer of money from state to personal accounts, from corruption or from kickbacks. Their owners often use opaque methods to hide their capital, assured of impunity, particularly due to tax havens, and also assured of the complacency of developed nations.
List of assets seized (known incomplete)
Gabonese president Ali Bongo Ondimba is estimated to have paid €98 million to the Pozzo di Borgo family for the Soyecourt hôtel particulier in the rue de l'Université (7th arrondissement). He is not of course the only foreigner to have bought luxury real estate in Paris. Realtors estimate that over €4 million, half of all real estate buyers are foreigners.
Gabon - Assets seized from the family of Omar BongoRestitutions Made
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>the following may be out of date -trans
Switzerland has made several restitutions:
The United Kingdom has also returned to Nigeria funds that Sani Abacha had sheltered in Jersey in the Channel Islands.
The United States and its allies in Iraq have accomplished the largest restitution to date, seizing more than $2 billion in 2003 from the family of Saddam Hussein, which will be used to rebuild Iraq.
France, the first G8 country to ratify the United Nations Convention against Corruption, known as the Mérida Convention, has not undertaken any restitution measures.
Spain
In May 2009. the Spanish anticorruption prosecutor requested a money-laundering investigation of the accounts and investments in Spain of the president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang, following a complaint filed in December 2008 by the Asociacion pro derechos humanos de España (APDHE). The association was concerned by a transfer of roughly €19 million between 2000 and 2003 from the US bank Riggs Bank to an account in a Spanish bank in the Balearic Islands.
France
Laws put into effect after the liberation of France in the Second World War targeted illegitimate profits accrued during the Occupation, in the black market or through simple theft. The ordinances of October 18, 1944 and January 6, 1945 drew inspiration from the following principle: "The most elementary fiscal justice requires that all gains made possible by the presence of the enemy be returned to the public treasury. It is unacceptable that while the nation became impoverished some enriched themselves at its expense."
Citing this precedent, in March 2007 Survie, the Sherpa Association and the Fédération des Congolais de la Diaspora filed charges of conspiracy and concealment of diversion of funds in the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris against five heads of African states and their families:
The three NGO organizations suspected these heads or former heads of state of buying up a surprising number of luxury real estate assets in France, and of holding banking assets in French banks and/or foreign banks doing business in France. An investigation opened in June 2007 was characterized as insufficiently detailed and suspended in November 2007.
The French newspaper Le Monde obtained transcripts for the hearing into whether to pursue the investigation and in January 2008 published a list of dozens of real estate properties owned by family members of Sassou Nguesso and Omar Bongo in Paris and in the south of France, some of them worth millions of euros. Maître William Bourdon of Survie, the plaintiffs' legal representation, denounced the decision to close the case as "astounding" (ahurissant) The family of Omar Bongo Ondimba, according to the Le Monde hearing transcripts, owned 33 apartments or houses including a hôtel particulier in Paris worth more than €18 million. The hôtel particulier was purchased in June 2007 by a real estate company associated with two children of the Gabonese president, then aged 13 and 16. The family of Sassou Nguesso owned at least 18 apartments or houses in France
In Gabon, an association christened Touche pas à mon président (Don't touch my president) was formed in July 2008 to protest the NGOs denouncing the real estate assets of Omar Bongo.
On December 2, 2008, Transparency International France, Sherpa and a Gabonese citizen named Grégory Ngbwa Mintsa filed new charges against Omar Bongo, Denis Sassou Nguesso and Teodoro Obiang as well as their entourages, of concealing the embezzlement of public funds.
Maître Patrick Maisonneuve, the lawyer for Omar Bongo, announced the same day that a defamation complaint would be filed based on the allegations of embezzlement, intimidation and corruption, but as of May 2009 no such complaint had been filed. On December 5 Congolese government spokesman Alain Akouala Atipault announced that the Congo had filed a complaint in the Tribunal de grande instance of Paris against Transparency International France and Sherpa. "I have simply decided that my lawyer in Paris will pursue these gentlemen (TI and Sherpa), who are in reality a few bourgeois in Neuilly who may never even have set foot in the Congo", declared Sassou Nguesso.
December 31, 2008 Grégory Ngbwa Mintsa, a party to the ill-gotten goods complaint in France, was questioned and imprisoned for "possession of a document with intent to distribute it for propaganda purposes" and "oral or written propaganda with intent to incite revolt against the authorities," with, on January 7, three leaders of a Gabonese NGO and a journalist as a result of a complaint filed by Fondation Omar Bongo. On January 8 Maître Thierry Lévy, lawyer for the Gabonese, was prevented by the border police, police aux frontières (PAF), at Roissy airport in Paris from boarding a plane for Libreville, his four-day visa having been cancelled by the Gabonese authorities "for security reasons". The conditional release of the four on January 12 was accompanied by a mandat de dépôt.
January 20, 2009 the Congolese journalist Bruno Ossébi, who had expressed the intention of joining the complaint, was the victim of a fire at his home in Brazzaville. Ossebi's companion and his two children died in the fire. Bruno Ossébi suffered second-degree burns but had been recovering when he died suddenly February 2 in Brazzaville. According to Reporters without Borders, who said it was "probable" that the fire was a deliberate attack, Ossḗbi had three days earlier published an article on the online news site Mwinga alleging that the national petroleum corporation, managed by the president's son, had approached a French bank about a $100 million loan secured by its oil production, in contravention of Congo's pledges to the International Monetary Fund. He had made contact with the Stolen Goods Recovery Initiative at the World Bank, just two days earlier.
The next day another, much less serious fire also broke out at the Orlḗans home of Benjamin Toungamani. In December Benjamin Toungamani filed a complaint with French police against unknown persons because of death threats against his family. At the request of the prosecution, the decision in this case, scheduled for the end of February, was pushed back until after the visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Congo-Brazzaville at the end of March.
May 5, 2009, the most senior investigating judge in Paris, Françoise Desset, agreed to hear the case, a decision the prosecutor appealed. On October 29, 2009, the Paris court of appeal upheld the Ministry and found that Transparency International lacked standing. Following the association's appeal the French court of cassation, the court of final appeal, la Cour de cassation on November 9, 2010 found that Transparency International could participate in the suit, henceforth allowing a French examining magistrate to investigate.
A February 2011 alert from Tracfin, the money-laundering unit of the French finance ministry mentioned the purchase by Obiang's son of €18 million worth of fine art in February 2009 alone.
October 6, 2011, Transparency International France and Sherpa announced a new complaint in civil court to circumvent the umpteenth block by the prosecutor's office, which had been refusing an indictment needed for the examining magistrates to deal with new facts discovered in the course of their investigation.
July 12, 2012, the examining magistrates in charge of the investigation issued an international arrest warrant for Teodorin Nguema Obiang following his refusal to appear. For Maud Perdriel-Vaissière, director of Sherpa, this step demonstrated "the seriousness of the allegations Sherpa has been making from the first [...] and show that nobody should believe themselves above law. From now on, immunity is no longer a synonym of impunity".
March 19, 2014 the juges d'instruction of the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris indicted Teodorin Nguema Obiang for money-laundering.
Monaco
March 30, 2009 Monaco opened an investigation into accounts in the name of Édith Bongo, wife of Bongo and daughter of Sassou Nguesso, who died March 14, 2009. She was suspected of having acted as nominee for both Bongo et Sassou Nguesso in several banking establishments, in order to mask assets obtained with of diverted funds. The investigation was opened following a letter from the Sherpa organization to prince Albert II and to the prosecutor of Monaco, requesting an investigation and the freezing of the financial assets in Monaco of Édith Bongo.
Switzerland
Switzerland returned $594 million to Nigeria from accounts associated with former dictator Sani Abacha.
Mobutu funds
The Swiss Confederation decided to extend to April 30, 2009 the freezing instituted May 17, 1997 of 8.3 million Swiss francs in a Mobutu Sese Seko account.
Duvalier funds
The 12th of February 2009, the federal office of the Swiss justice system ordered restitution to the Haitian people of 7 million Swiss francs (€4.6 million) frozen in Swiss bank accounts since 1986, to finance development projects. Former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier filed an appeal of this decision on March 19, 2009.