{"id":37993,"date":"2019-03-29T22:22:45","date_gmt":"2019-03-29T22:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=37993"},"modified":"2019-03-29T22:22:45","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T22:22:45","slug":"gambias-ex-president-yahya-jammeh-stole-at-least-362m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=37993","title":{"rendered":"Gambia’s ex-President Yahya Jammeh ‘stole at least $362m’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Gambia’s former president Yahya Jammeh<\/a> stole at least $362m from the state during his 22-year rule, the West African country’s justice minister has said following a nearly two-year investigation.<\/p>\n

Jammeh, who seized power in a 1994 coup, fled The Gambia<\/a> in 2017 for exile in Equatorial Guinea as an African regional force closed in on the capital Banjul to enforce his election loss to President Adama Barrow.<\/p>\n

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou provided a summary of a report compiled by a commission of inquiry. The report, which has not yet been made public, was based on interviews with 253 witnesses.<\/span><\/p>\n

“This is a staggering amount of money that could have had significant impact on the lives of the ordinary people of this country,” said Tambadou.<\/p>\n

“Instead, it was money used to satisfy the pretentious and delusional lifestyle of an egotistic megalomaniac, acts that were both unconscionable and criminal.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jammeh has not commented on the accusations from his base in Equatorial Guinea, but his supporters in The Gambia have dismissed investigations of him as a witch-hunt.<\/span><\/p>\n

The probe established that Jammeh claimed titles on 281 landed properties in the country, as well as assets abroad, including a residence in the\u00a0United States<\/a>, according to Tambadou. It also found the former leader’s assets in his home village of Kanilai alone were worth $28.2m.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Gambia’s new authorities believe Jammeh took many of his cars and valuable items with him, after a period of rule characterised by extrajudicial killings<\/a>, torture and forced disappearances, as well as the pilfering of state assets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They previously said that money was stolen by creating fake accounts at the central bank and skimming money from the national telecommunications agency and other state institutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tambadou said the new government was working to recover the stolen money.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Barrow, the new president, has promised to “stand firm” in implementing the report’s recommendations “without fear or favour”.<\/p>\n

So far, Barrow’s government has sold off some of the possessions Jammeh left behind, including planes and Rolls-Royces with his name embroidered into the headrests.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A report<\/a> earlier this week by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a non-profit investigative reporting outlet, said that Jammeh and his associates “looted or misappropriated” at least $975m.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The project said that bank statements, contracts, government correspondence and internal reports show “a web of fraud that far exceeds the figure offered” by Gambian authorities. <\/span><\/p>\n

The money that was not funnelled to presidential controlled bank accounts went to businesses that received lucrative contracts from the former leader, the investigative group said. <\/span><\/p>\n

He got away with it because The Gambia is small, with a population of some two million people, and remained relatively obscure, the group said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Gambia, meanwhile, faces a debt burden that reached 130 percent of gross domestic product last year, leading the\u00a0IMF<\/a>\u00a0to warn the country against any new borrowing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Gambia’s former president Yahya Jammeh stole at least $362m from the state during his 22-year rule, the West African country’s justice minister has said following a nearly two-year investigation. Jammeh, who seized power in a 1994 coup, fled The Gambia in 2017 for exile in Equatorial Guinea as an African regional force closed in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":37994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}