Kickbacks between Libya and the West Have Helped Gaddafi Cling to Power
THE GUARDIAN: All Gaddafi's rapprochement with the west has achieved is to give him the resources to tighten his grip on the Libyan people

Colonel Gaddafi is nothing if not a caring father. He does everything he can for his boys, arranging, for example, that they grow hugely rich from corrupt dealings with foreign companies. Extracts from leaked state department documents published in the New York Times provide the evidence for this. Emanating from WikiLeaks, they include one state department cable which in 2009 came to the pithy conclusion: "Libya is a kleptocracy in which the regime – either the al-Qadhafi family itself or its close political allies – has a direct stake in anything worth buying, selling or owning." (The cable used the department's spelling of Gaddafi.) Other cables revealed it sometimes demands billion-dollar "signing bonuses" for contracts with western oil companies. A Canadian company, Petro-Canada, was reported in the Toronto Globe and Mail not only to have paid one such bonus but also to have sponsored an exhibition of the dreadful paintings of Saif Gaddafi and to have been involved, through a middleman, in getting him to take part in a pheasant shoot on Princess Anne's Gloucestershire estate.

This bonanza of kickbacks and corrupt deals, in which western companies greedy for Libyan oil participated, got under way when the US reopened trade with Libya in 2004, the year Tony Blair paid his famous visit to the colonel in his desert retreat and kissed him on his hairy cheeks. Their embrace seems even more nauseating now, for it marked the beginning of a period in which the Gaddafi regime began to accumulate the wealth with which it may yet frustrate the purposes of the US, France and Britain. » | Alexander Chancellor | Friday, February 25, 2011