CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

52 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
TABLE 3.1 WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?
Estimates of Funds
Head of Government Allegedly Embezzled
Mohamed Suharto, Indonesia, 1967–1998 $15 to $35 billion
Ferdinand Marcos, Philippines, 1972–1986 $5 to $10 billion
Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire, 1965–1997 $5 billion
Sani Abacha, Nigeria, 1993–1998 $2 to $5 billion
Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia, 1989–2000 $1 billion
Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haiti, 1971–1986 $300 to $800 million
Alberto Fujimori, Peru, 1990–2000 $600 million
Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine, 1996–1997 $114 to $200 million
Arnoldo Alemán, Nicaragua, 1997–2002 $100 million
Joseph Estrada, Philippines, 1998–2001 $78 to $80 million
Source: Transparency International, Global Corruption Report, 2004 (Sterling, VA:
Pluto Press, 2004), 13.
erated tens of millions of dollars sloshing out of the central bank. Benazir
Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan certainly understood the concept of
self-enrichment and will be covered shortly. Omar Bongo of Gabon was
tagged with $130 million in U.S. deposits in a 1999 Senate hearing at which
I testified. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is currently accused of grabbing all
he can and shifting money to Singapore and Malaysia. And then there is
that most genial of master pickpockets, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, president
of Côte d’Ivoire. The key person in the Bank of France in a position to know
told me that, at the time of Houphouët-Boigny’s death in 1993, his accumulated
assets outside Côte d’Ivoire totaled seven billion dollars! Startled
that a small one-crop country selling cocoa could produce such offshore
wealth for its leader, I blurted, “Dollars or francs?” He repeated, “Dollars!”
Côte d’Ivoire has since descended into chaos. This rogues’ gallery could continue
for many more paragraphs.
Indeed, where did the money go? Into western coffers, where it can be
accommodated with all the courtliness and secrecy available to the world’s
rich, whether saints or scoundrels.