Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir may have deposited up to $9 billion from Sudan’s public coffers in British banks, according to secret US diplomatic cables leaked to the Guardian and published Friday.
Some of the money is believed to be held by Lloyds Banking Group, according to UN Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. He told Alejandro D Wolff, former US ambassador to the UN, “it was time to go public with the scale of Bashir’s theft in order to turn Sudanese public opinion against him.” It could turn Bashir from “a crusader to a thief” in Sudanese eyes, he said.
The cable was sent shortly after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Bashir in March 2009 for alleged war crimes in the conflict-torn Darfur area, west Sudan.
But Lloyds denied holding the money. "We have absolutely no evidence to suggest there is any connection between Lloyds Banking Group and Mr. Bashir. The group's policy is to abide by the legal and regulatory obligations in all jurisdictions in which we operate."
Sudan also dismissed the allegations. “To claim that the president can control the treasury and take money to put into his own accounts is ludicrous – it is a laughable claim by the ICC prosecutor,” Khalid al-Mubarak, a spokesman at Sudan's London embassy, told the Guardian.
News of the leaked cable comes ahead of an anticipated referendum in Sudan in January, which is expected to separate the country into two, North and South. A civil war between the two parts lasted 22 years and took the lives of about 1.9 million civilians.
“If the cable is true, more than just doing business with an indicted war criminal, Lloyd's could be in some sense contributing to instability and mistrust in Sudan at the most fragile moment in its history,” Global Witness campaigner Robert Palmer told the German News Agency DPA.
