Tunisia risks losing Ben Ali's frozen assets in Switzerland
Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011, as street protests against his autocratic regime intensified.
FETHI BELAID AFP / File
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2 min
D-1 before the thaw of the assets of the Ben Ali clan in Switzerland.
Ten years after the Tunisian revolution, the family and relatives of the deposed dictator could recover tens of millions of euros.
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With our correspondent in Tunis,
Michel Picard
In January 2011, nearly forty people belonging to the Ben Ali clan saw their
assets frozen just
five days after the dictator fled.
The order issued by the Swiss federal justice allowing the preventive blocking of these assets for a period of ten years expires on Tuesday at midnight.
In the absence of new Geneva legal proceedings or final judgments in Tunis, the courts will no longer have the legal means to withhold this money.
The risk of seeing those close to the
dictator who died
in 2019 transferring this money from Switzerland to other banks is therefore very real.
The sums concerned would be around 200 million euros and for the time being only 3 to 4 million have been recovered.
In total, several billion euros would have been unduly transferred abroad under the dictatorship.
Several civil society organizations have just issued a solemn appeal to the President of the Republic to use his prerogatives to prevent the unfreezing of the sums looted.
Some observers denounce the nonchalance of the Tunisian authorities on this issue, which risks symbolizing the inability, or even the lack of will, to condemn and make the actors of the dictatorship pay.
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To read also: January 14, 2011, the Ben Ali era ends in Tunisia
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Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
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