Yahya Jammeh lost Gambia's presidential elections in 2017, after 22 years in power. Since then, a massive clean-up of Gambian institutions has begun. But the cost of his rule has been dear.
Yahya Jammeh once said he would rule the Gambia for “one billion years”. His rule proved somewhat shorter — he lost the presidential elections in 2017 after 22 years in power.
This week, a six-month investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project , titled, has revealed how, with the aid of people like an alleged Hezbollah financier Mohammed Bazzi, at least $1-billion was siphoned from the country. Some of Bazzi’s activities in Europe, through one of his companies, Global Trading Group, can all be traced through one bank: KBC, formerly known as Kredietbank. This has been gleaned from records of bank transfers connected to the company’s activities in Belgium. KBC is a financial behemoth and one of the top three banks in Belgium, with a market capitalisation of $25-billion in 2018.
“We were dealing with an abnormal situation,” Amadou Colley, the central bank’s governor from 2010 to 2017 said, adding that he had feared for his life and his family’s safety. Detailed evidence suggests that KBC and its subsidiary Kredietbank Luxembourg were a central node in the apartheid state’s “arms money machine”. They were, according to insiders, the bankers for up to 70% of the regime’s arms slush fund between the 1970s and 1980s.
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