Is This House the Key to Seizing Gaddafi Assets in the UK?

 

Seven Winnington Close may sound like any suburban address, but this house in London's Millionaire's Row may be the first Gaddafi family asset in the UK to be returned to the Libyan government - and could help Libyan lawyers reclaim others too.

In March the $16million house was on the rental market for $15,000 per week, when a group of Libyan squatters moved in and began living there for nothing.

7 Winnington Close in numbers

• Cost: £10m
• Size: 696 sq m
• Bedrooms: 7
• Reception rooms: 5
• Other features: indoor swimming pool, suede-lined cinema, marble foyer

It has seven or eight bedrooms with luxury en suite bathrooms, an indoor swimming pool and a suede-lined cinema room, though one of the squatters, from a group called Topple the Tyrants, has said "even the jacuzzi stays turned off".

Long presumed to belong to Col Gaddafi's eldest son, Saif al-Islam - formerly a student at the LSE - the BBC has learned that in fact it belongs to his second son, Saadi.The squatters say they will not leave until it is returned to the Libyan people. Whether that happens - and if so, when - is now in the hands of London's High Court.
Lawyers acting for the Libyan embassy asked the court this month for ownership to be transferred to the Libyan government, think their case is a strong one, thanks to some key information provided by British officials.

Formally the house is listed under the name Capitana Seas Limited, a company based in the British Virgin Islands, where secrecy laws would usually make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discover the real owner. But once UN sanctions had been imposed on Libya, requiring the British government to freeze assets controlled by the Gaddafis in the UK, the British Treasury got the British Virgin Islands to reveal the beneficial owner of Capitana Seas.

"They [British Treasury] confirmed to us that the reason the company's assets in the UK are under sanctions is because the owner is Saadi Gaddafi," says Mohamed Shaban, the lawyer tasked with tracking down the Gaddafi family's assets in the UK. "We can show that the benefit of this asset goes to Saadi Gaddafi - you can't get much stronger evidence than from the British Virgin Islands Companies House and HM Treasury. The court won't have a problem with that." Mr Shaban says he is confident he can prove that Saadi Gaddafi, 38, acquired 7 Winnington Close illegally or through misappropriation of Libyan funds.

Saadi Gaddafi's job as a commander of Unit 48 in the Libyan Ministry of Defence would not have provided an income sufficient to buy the house, Mr Shaban says, nor would his brief career as a professional footballer in Italy's Serie A. Nor has any big gift to him from his father been registered, as it would need to have been under Libyan law.

He adds that the case is, in a way, a test case, because it should help the Libyan legal team gauge the level of evidence and argument needed by the High Court in any future attempts to claim back Gaddafi assets. Mr Shaban already has other properties in his sights - in the salubrious Knightsbridge area of London - which he suspects belong to the Gaddafis.

Saadi Gaddafi

• 38 years old
• Col Gaddafi's second eldest son
• Married the daughter of a military commander
• Brief football career in Italy's Serie A
• Ran the Libyan Football Federation
• Under house arrest in Niger after fleeing Libya in September 2011
• Had hoped to escape to Mexico

"There are neighbours that have given us very strong information, eyewitness testimony that a particular very expensive property was regularly used by sons of Col Gaddafi over the years and they suspect it was Saif and Mutassim," he says.

Because Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is wanted by the International Criminal Court Mr Shaban has handed over the information to the ICC's financial crimes unit. He also believes there are Gaddafi bank accounts in the UK but says these may be harder to pin down, because of the UK's Data Protection Act.

Robert Palmer of the anti-corruption watchdog Global Witness says years of living under sanctions turned Col Gaddafi into a master of asset-hiding. "It's pretty simple to hide your identity behind offshore shell companies to disguise that you actually own or control something. You can create a web of different structures, associates, business people and intermediaries to hide your assets," says Mr Palmer. "You have to be a pretty stupid dictator to put money in your own name nowadays," he says

In March the former governor of Libya's central bank, Farhat Bengara, said Libya had around $168bn in frozen assets, connected with the Gaddafi regime. In the UK, Mr Shaban is hopeful of gaining control of Gaddafi-owned properties, but is pessimistic about the prospects of repatriating the family's cash.