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It's just a couple orders of magnitude

During his three decades in office, Mobutu Sese Seko stole quite a bit of money from his nation of Zaire, squirreling it away in Swiss bank accounts. Estimates of the money stolen place the amount in multiple billions of dollars, money that could really help former Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) deal with any number of current problems. The DRC's government was hopeful that the Swiss government would repatriate something on the order of a billion dollars or so up until yesterday, when the Swiss announced that they'll be handing back $6.6 million instead.

Naturally, the government of the DRC is a little disappointed. The Swiss government insists that's all the embezzled money they have on hand. Did the dictator somehow spend the other $990 million while he was still alive?

Unfortunately for the government of the DRC, they're going to have very, very little leverage over the Swiss.

BBC article

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 17, 2007 11:03 AM.

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