Biens mal acquis

This article is currently being translated trom the French wikipedia

'Biens mal acquis translates as "ill-gotten goods". It is a phrase used in corruption proceedings in some countries. Assets have been seized from former politicians and leaders found to have misappropriated them, and returned in restitution to the coffers of the countries they came from. The Belgian Centre national de coopération au développement (CNCD) or National Center for Cooperation in Development, defines ill-gotten goods as all fixed or liquid assets or funds susceptible to misappropriation and illegal removal from the public heritage, thereby impoverishing the heritage of the state.

These may be the product of tortious or criminal activities that enabled enrichment of leaders that their incomes cannot justify. They may be the result of diversion of funds, theft or illicit transfer of money from state to personal accounts, of corruption or kickbacks. Those responsible often use opaque methods for the evaporation of capital, assured of impunity, particularly due to tax havens and the complicity of developed nations.

A March 2007 study by the Comité catholique contre la faim et pour le développement (Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development) estimates that $100-180 billion in assets have been diverted by national leaders in recent decades. Mobutu Sese Seko for example, the former military dictator of Zaïre from 1965 to his death in 1997, had a personal fortune of $5–6 billion when he died, but left the State with a public debt of $13 billion.

Restitutions

the following may be out of date -trans

Switzerland has made several restitutions:

• $658 million returned in 2003 after 17 years of litigation in the Philippines over the funds of Ferdinand Marcos
• $2.4 million from the Malian dictator Moussa Traoré
• Switzerland restituted $380 million (£260 million) to Nigeria in March of 2015 from accounts in the name of the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. It had preiously returned $700m from Abacha's Swiss accounts. This was the first restitution of its kind.
• $80 million diverted by the family of Alberto Fujimori in Peru

United Kingdom returned to Nigeria funds that Sani Abacha had sheltered in Jersey.

The United States and its allies in Iraq accomplished the largest restitution to date, seizing more than $2 billion in 2003 from the family of Saddam Hussein, which willl be used to rebuild Iraq.

France, the first G8 country to ratify the United Nations Convention against Corruption, known as the Mérida Convention, has not taken any restitution measures.

Restitution proceedings underway

Spain

In May 2009. the Spanish anticorruption prosecutor requested a money-laundering investigation of the accounts and investments in Spain of the president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang following a complaint filed in December 2008 by the association pour les droits de l'Homme en Espagne, about a transfer of roughly €19 millions from the American Riggs Bank to an account in a Spanish bank in the Balearic Islands, between 2000 et 2003. p

France

Laws put into effect after the liberation of France in the Second World War targeting illegitimate profits accrued during the Occupation constituted a precedent. Les ordinances of October 18, 1944 and January 6, 1945 drew inspiration from the following principle: "The most elementary fiscal justice requires that all gains made possible by the presence of the enemy be returned to the public treasury. It is unaccepable that while the nation became impoverished some enriched themselved at its expense."

In March 2007 Survie, the Sherpa Association and the Fédération des Congolais de la Diaspora filed charges of conspiracy and concealment of funds diversion in the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris against five heads of African states and their families:

• Omar Bongo Ondimba (Gabon),
• Denis Sassou Nguesso (Republic of Congo)
• Blaise Compaoré (Burkina Faso)
• Eduardo Dos Santos (Angola)
• Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea)

The three organizations suspected them of owning many luxury real estate assets in France, and of holding banking assets in French banks and/or foreign banks doing business in France. An investigation was opened in June 2007 but characterized as insufficiently detailed and suspended in November 2007.

The French newspaper Le Monde obtained the transcripts of the investigation and revealed in January 2008 that members of the family of Sassou Nguesso et Omar Bongo own dozens of houses and apartments in Paris and in the south of France, some of them worth millions of euros. The family of Omar Bongo Ondimba, according to the transcripts, owned 33 apartments or houses including a hôtel particulier worth more than €18 million in Paris, purchased in June 2007 by a real estate company associated with two children of the Gabonese president then aged 13 and 16. The family of Sassou Nguesso owned 18 apartments or houses in France

In Gabon, an association christened "Touche pas à mon président" (Don't touch my president) was formed in July 2008 to protest the NGOs denouncing the real estate assets of Omar Bongo.

December 2, 2008, Transparency International France, Sherpa and a Gabonese citizen named Grégory Ngbwa Mintsa filed new charges against Omar Bongo, Denis Sassou Nguesso and Teodoro Obiang as well as their entourages of concealing the diversion of public funds.

Maître Patrick Maisonneuve, the lawyer for Omar Bongo, announced the same day that a defamation complaint would be filed based on the allegations of funds diversion, intimidation and corruption, but as of May 2009 it had not. On December 5 Congolese government spokesman, Alain Akouala Atipault, announced that the Congo had filed a complaint in the Tribunal de grande instance of Paris against Transparency International France and Sherpa. "I have simply decided that my lawyer in Paris will pursue these gentlement (TI and Sherpa), who are in reality a few bourgeois in Neuilly who may never have set foot in the Congo", declared Sassou Nguesso.

December 31, 2008 Grégory Ngbwa Mintsa, a party to the complaint in France of ill-gotten goods, was questioned and imprisoned for "possession of a document with intent to distribute it for propaganda purposes" and "oral or written propaganda with intent to incite revolt against the authorities," with, on January 7, three leaders of a Gabonese NGO and a journalist as a result of a complaint filed by Fondation Omar Bongo. On January 8 Maître fr, lawyer for the Gabonese, was prevented by the police aux frontières (PAF), or border police, at Roissy airport in Paris from boarding a plane for Libreville, his four-day visa having been cancelled by the Gabonese authorities "for security reasons". The conditional release of the four on January 12 was accompanied by a mandat de dépôt.

January 20 2009 the Congolese journalist fr, who had expressed the intention of joining the complaint, was the victim of a fire at his home in Brazzaville. Ossebi's companion and his two children died in the fire. Bruno Ossébi suffered second-degree burns but had been recovering when he died suddenly February 2 in Brazzaville. According to Reporters without Borders, who said it was "probable" that the fire was a deliberate attack, Ossḗbi had three days earlier published an article on the online news site Mwinga alleging that the national petroleum corporation, managed by the president's son, had approached a French bank about a $100 million dollar loan secured by its oil production, in contravention of Congo's pledges to the International Monetary Fund. Two days before his death he made contact with the Stolen Goods Recovery Initiative at the World Bank.

The next day another, much less serious fire also broke out at the Orlḗans home of Benjamin Toungamani. In December Benjamin Toungamani filed a complaint with French police against unknown persons because of death threats against his family. At the request of the prosecution, the decision in this case, scheduled for the end of February, was pushed back until after the visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Congo-Brazzaville at the end of March.

May 5, 2009, the most senior investigating judge in Paris, Françoise Desset, agreed to hear the case, a decision the prosecutor appealed. October 29, 2009, the Paris court of appeal upheld the Ministry and found that Transparency International lacked standing. Following the association's appeal the Appeal court for France, la Cour de cassation on November 9, 2010 found that Transparency International was could participate in the suit, henceforth allowing a French examining magistrate to investigate.

October 6, 2011, Transparency International France and Sherpa annonced a new complaint in civil court to circumvent the umpteenth block by the prosecutor's office, which had been refusing an indictment needed for the examining magistrates to deal with new facts discovered in the course of their investigation.

July 12, 2012, the examining magistrates in charge of the investigation issued an international arrest warrant for Teodorin Nguema Obiang following his refusal to appear. For Maud Perdriel-Vaissière, director of Sherpa, this step demonstrated "the seriousness of the allegations Sherpa has been making from the first [...] and show that nobody should believe themselves above law. From now on, immunity is no longer a synonym of impunity."

March 19, 2014 the juges d'instruction of the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris indicted Teodorin Nguema Obiang for money-laundering.

Monaco

March 30, 2009 Monaco opened an investigation into accounts in the name of Édith Bongo, wife of Bongo and daughter of Sassou Nguesso, who died March 14, 2009. She was suspected of acting as nominee for both Bongo et Sassou Nguesso in several banking establishments, in order to mask assets obtained with of diverted funds. The investigation was opened following a letter from the Sherpa to prince Albert II and to the prosecutor of Monaco, requestion an investigation and the freezing of the financial assets in Monaco of Édith Bongo.

Switzerland

Mobutu funds

The Swiss Confederation decided to extend to April 30, 2009 the freezing instituted May 17, 1997 of 8.3 million Swiss francs in a Mobutu Sese Seko account.

Duvalier funds

The 12th of February 2009, the federal office of the Swiss justice system ordered restitution to the Haitian people of 7 million Swiss francs (€4.6 million) frozen in Swiss bank accounts since 1986, to finance development projects. Former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier filed an appeal of this decision on March 19, 2009.