Turkey, the freezer of Libyan money

Several international reports speak about huge smuggling operations from Libya to Turkey since the fall of the Libyan state into the hands of armed militias back in 2011.

According to reports, the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya is carrying out organized operations with Turkey, in order to smuggle public Libyan money to Ankara. This is happening by making fake deals to obtain money from the Central Bank.

With this way they can smuggle the money abroad within the framework of money theft operations in which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is involved.

The Central Bank of Libya is now controlled by the MB, which gets huge funds from it, through which it pays out rewards to terrorists who have joined it, while the rest of the funds is sent to support the Turkish regime.

On the other hand, a financial official in the Libyan government confirmed that Turkey is withholding Libyan assets deposited in its banks, claiming that it is demanding compensation for Turkish companies and contracts that have been suspended due to the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, the volume of frozen Libyan funds in Turkish banks is about 4 billion dollars. All these funds are not withdrawable today and cannot be used by the Libyan state.

According to press reports, frozen dollars, looted by Turkey from Libyan banks and sold in Istanbul’s black market, cannot be deposited in banks, but they can be bought in stores because they are so-called frozen dollars.

While hundreds of millions of USD were being smuggled to Turkey, their serial numbers were reported, so they reached Erdogan as a valueless paper. 

In order to avoid bigger losses, the Turkish regime then sold the looted USD on the black market, and now Istanbul is known as the freezer of Libyan money.