Of course, Saddam and his two charming sons may still be alive, but suppose they were killed in the bombing of their complex last week. Or suppose they are killed in the near future. Saddam allegedly has hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of dollars stashed away somewhere. I don’t know what form of assets he owns. Perhaps much of it is in numbered Swiss bank accounts.
Can those accounts be identified? If so, who should get that money? Who will get it?
If the accounts cannot be identified, will the banks simply keep the money?
The banks cannot “simply keep the money” as long as there are heirs who can claim it.
I would assume that Swiss bankers have some kind of procedure for next-of-kin to reclaim it, proof of identity and so forth. It would be part of his estate, and not subject to confiscation by the next Iraqi government.
So there ya go. Be very surprised if the Swiss handed it over to anybody besides someone whose name was on the documents or the next-of-kin thereof.
He has other family besides the two sons, anyway. Besides the half-brother, there are also two wives, and “daughters” plural, along with “sons in law” plural.
The United States will grab the money by claiming it as “spoils of war.”
The United States will spend the money to put out Iraqi oil fires, rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, and pay for the upgrade of Iraq’s oil fields.
The money from #2 will go to companies like Haliburton and ExxonMobil and George W. Bush’s other petroleum buddies, who have been awarded the contracts to do all that work.
Haliburton stock goes up, and the money (indirectly) ends up in Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s bank accounts.
Interesting question. Obviously, it should go to the nation of Iraq, but whether it WILL go there seems to be in doubt.
Perhaps some descendant of Hussein’s can be persuaded to retrieve the money in exchange for leniency in the International Criminal Court? I have no idea.
The banks cannot keep the money and call it theirs. But, what they can do is hold the money in the numbered account for a long time, while paying low interest rates. This is a very profitable activity. E.g., suppose they hold $1 billion of Saddam’s money, on which their investments yield 4% interest, but the bank accounts only accrue 1% interest. Then the bank’s annual profit from holding the money would be 3% of $1 billion = $30 million.
Obviously the banks would have to give the money in the account to any heir or claimant with a legal right to it. But, for as long as it takes for that party to arrive and prove his case, the banks can make a fortune. And, if nobody ever shows up, then FAIK the banks may be able to keep these earnings going indefinitely.
Call me cynical, but I don’t think the banks will take the initiative in finding an heir to speedily withdraw the money!
The first thing that would have to happen is for the money to be un-frozen. As such, I doubt both that the US is going to get a whole lot of it, since the US has precious little international support for filling its coffers with the spoils of this war, nor that the banks will do a whole lot with it. What’s more likely is that a new Iraqi government BY Iraqis will declare all private assets of the regime seized, and the respective governments will comply and lift the block on transfer of the money so that the money can be used.
I personally think it will be very interesting how things pan out. The Iraqis already said they see no reason to let the US decide what happens with their oil, and will not feel bound by any treaties or contracts, which might make a whole lot of companies unhappy when their presumedly lucrative reconstruction contracts suddenly are worth less than the paper they are written on. Aside from that, the fact that the US is already distributing such contracts can not the least lead to some nasty conflicts at the WTO.
I hope I’m not the only one reading the thread title as “Who will get Saddam’s monkey?”
I mean, here I was thinking that Saddam had gone Jacko under the pressure - and it’s just about boring ol’ money. Not that I wouldn’t accept Saddam’s money any less I’d accept Saddam’s monkey, of course.
