Ahmed Kashadah, head of the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio (LAIP), has said that some assets of the fund should continue to be frozen. He told Libya Herald:
“We want them to be frozen [by the EU]. There are some legal issues that need to be sorted out before we will ask for them to be unfrozen.”
He said the task of establishing the nature and location of the full portfolio of assets was made the harder because some files had never actually existed in a recognisable form; sometimes there were no appraisals, no business plans, no due diligence at all.
These were the projects where someone from the Qaddafi inner circle rang up and simply said that this was the deal that was going ahead and that payment should be made. To add to the confusion, not all the files were kept at LAIP’s headquarters.
Some assets were held through a network of four or five different companies, each of which had to instal new boards and this was what was taking the time.
The LAIP is a subsidiary of the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA).
(Source: Libya Herald)
