JERUSALEM, Nov. 11 (JTA) — When Yasser Arafat is
buried, he will take with him one of the enduring secrets of the
Palestinian regime — the whereabouts of a missing fortune in
ill-gotten public funds.
Ranked sixth on Forbes magazine’s 2003 list of “the richest
kings, queens and despots,” with an estimated private coffer of at
least $300 million, Arafat never divulged his finances during
decades as a terrorist chieftain and later as Palestinian Authority
president.
U.S. accountants commissioned by the Palestinian Authority, where
Finance Minister Salem Fayyad has garnered global praise for
instituting reform, found that part of Arafat’s personal wealth was
in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion.
Arafat was declared dead of organ failure in a French hospital
Thursday after a week that included wrangling between his wife,
Suha, and his financial adviser, Mohammed Rashid. According to
Palestinian sources, one dispute was over the fortune’s fate.
“The president is not known to have left a will, let alone all
the details on where the money is kept,” one Palestinian source said
told JTA. “So now it’s a free-for-all on getting the bank
information.”
Yet Rashid has been adamant in defending Arafat’s good name.
“If this money does exist, let the Israelis and Americans find
it,” he told Israel’s Yediot Achronot newspaper. “It is impossible
these days to hide those kind of sums anywhere in the world.”
For ordinary Palestinians, venting ire at the unseemly behavior
of Suha Arafat was the limit of public censure, given the gravity of
losing their “national father.”
There also was the fact that, while Suha lived lavishly in Paris
on a reported monthly allowance of $100,000, her husband led an
ascetic existence locked away in his ruined Ramallah headquarters —
hardly the picture of high-roller corruption.
But with poverty deepening in the West Bank and Gaza Strip amid
the 4-year-old intifada, Arafat’s successors may find themselves at
pains to explain the missing cash, much of which was donated by Arab
states and the European Union.
“It’s the money of the Palestinian people,” Palestinian lawmaker
Hassan Khreishe told The Associated Press, adding that he would urge
a parliamentary investigation.
Arafat was believed to have used some of the money to buy loyalty
and to finance the activities of terrorist groups under the umbrella
of his Fatah movement.
French officials launched a probe earlier this year into the
alleged transfer of $11.5 million from Swiss bank accounts to Suha
Arafat. She denied any wrongdoing.
In 2003, the International Monetary Fund found that from 1995 to
2000, $900 million had been “diverted” from the Palestinian budget
to an account controlled by Arafat.
But the IMF said most of that money was invested in Palestinian
assets and Fayyad had assumed public control of it.
Swiss investment adviser Jean-Claude Robard told Al-Jazeera
satellite television earlier this month that Arafat had bank
accounts in Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands.
The AP cited financial sources as saying that Arafat’s PLO also
owned an airline in the Maldives, a Greek shipping company, banana
plantations, an African diamond mine and real estate throughout the
Middle East.
Israeli newspapers said Arafat also has an account in Tel Aviv,
where Israel deposited tax and customs revenues collected on
Palestinian salaries and goods under the Oslo accords.
According to Yediot Achronot, Israel put over $500 million into
that account, before freezing it when the intifada erupted.
|