The $300 million man
Jerusalem post ^ | 3-2-03
Congratulations are in order for Yasser Arafat. After a long and arduous career spanning nearly four decades, he has apparently succeeded in creating a cozy little nest egg for himself, so much so that Forbes magazine now lists him as one of the world's wealthiest people. Who ever said that terrorism doesn't pay?
With a personal fortune estimated at $300 million stashed away in secret Swiss accounts, Arafat is among those featured in the magazine's annual listing of the well-to-do. In a new category introduced this year entitled "Kings, Queens, and Despots," Forbes places Arafat in a respectable sixth place, right after Queen Elizabeth II of England, but ahead of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
While acknowledging that it is "a tricky business" to assess exactly how much Arafat and others on this select list might truly be worth, Forbes wryly notes that they deserve their own separate ranking because, "They don't exactly represent success stories of entrepreneurial capitalism."
In Arafat's case, that is putting it mildly. For a man who used to boast about being married to the Palestinian revolution, he has done more than his fair share of plundering his own people, treating their public resources as his personal ATM machine to be looted at will.
This is not the first time, of course, that Arafat's finances have come under scrutiny, raising serious questions about the utility of international aid programs to the Palestinians. Over much of the past decade, there have been sporadic reports about the chairman's vast wealth, suggesting that Arafat, like other dictators, has no qualms about defrauding those in need.
In November 1995, the US General Accounting Office compiled a report on Arafat's finances, but it was kept top secret due to unexplained "national security interests," which presumably meant a desire not to embarrass the Palestinian leader. In April 1997, the Israeli media revealed the existence of a secret bank account kept by Arafat in Tel Aviv, of all places.
Last June, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan published photocopies of documents from Cairo indicating that Arafat had deposited $5.1 million into a private account he maintains in Egypt. The money, which had been donated by Gulf Arab states to help needy Palestinians, went instead to cover the living expenses of Arafat's wife and daughter, who reside in Paris.
Then, last August, OC Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze'evi (Farkash), in testimony before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that Arafat's fortune amounted to $1.3 billion.
Whatever the precise figure, the fact remains that Arafat has been dipping his hand into the cookie jar, and it is about time that he be called to account for doing so. Some $5.5 billion in international aid has been sent to the Palestinian-controlled areas since 1994, much of it from the European Union. Nevertheless, there has been a great deal of reluctance among EU officials to carry out a thorough investigation of what became of all that money.
But this may finally be about to change. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Francois Zimeray, a European Parliament Member (Socialist Party, France), the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) launched an investigation last month into the PA's misuse of European aid. Working over the objections of External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten, Zimeray essentially had to force the EU's hand by gathering the requisite 178 signatures of fellow parliamentarians.
The burden now will fall on OLAF to conduct a comprehensive and earnest inquiry, something that, as Rachel Ehrenfeld pointed out in these pages on Friday, has never been done to date. "Despite EU claims to the contrary," Ehrenfeld wrote, "no real effort to monitor how the money it provided the PA was actually spent has ever taken place."
Moreover, after the Karine A affair last year, and the documents uncovered by the IDF during Operation Defensive Shield which revealed that Arafat had personally authorized the transfer of funds to terrorists it is essential that the funding pipeline be cut off. Money, after all, is fungible, and if the EU continues transferring funds to Arafat, who continues to finance terrorism, then the Europeans themselves bear part of the blame for the bloodshed that results.
Aware of the mounting international criticism he has faced in recent years regarding corruption, Arafat appointed a new finance minister, Salam Fayyad, in June 2002. Though Fayyad has taken several steps to try to improve the transparency of the PA's finances, Arafat reportedly circumvents and ignores him. Arafat's personal corruption may be the least of the reasons why it is in the interest of Palestinians and Israelis that he be removed from office, but it is one more that should be added to the list |
