“During half a century of power in Syria, the Assad clan could “pump” up to 12 billion dollars out of the country through state monopolies, drug trade, and partly through reinvestments.”, — write: epravda.com.ua
During half a century of power in Syria, the Assad clan could “pump” up to 12 billion dollars out of the country through state monopolies, drug trade, and partly through reinvestments. The Wall Street Journal writes about it. The Assad family has built a wide network of investments and business interests in the decades since Assad’s father seized power in 1970, the paper said. Among the international acquisitions made by close relatives of Bashar al-Assad are luxury real estate in Russia, a boutique hotel in Vienna and a private jet in Dubai, according to former US officials, lawyers and research organizations that have studied the fortunes of the ruling family.Advertisement: Human rights activists say that plan to discover new assets, hoping to return them to the Syrian people. But the exact size of the Assad family’s wealth and which family members control which assets remains unknown. A 2022 US State Department report said the amounts were difficult to determine, but estimates suggested that businesses and assets linked to Assad could be worth between $1 billion and $12 billion. The report said the money was often obtained through state-owned monopolies and the drug trade, including the amphetamine captagon, and was partly reinvested in jurisdictions beyond the reach of international law.Advertisement: The Assad clan’s wealth continued to grow while ordinary Syrians suffered the effects of the ensuing civil war. in 2011. According to World Bank estimates, in 2022, almost 70% of the country’s population lived below the poverty line. Many influential members of the heavily militarized regime were business-oriented, including Bashar al-Assad’s wife Asma, a British-born former JPMorgan banker. In 2019, a Paris court froze real estate worth 90 million euros (about $95 million) belonging to Rifaat Assad, the uncle of Bashar al-Assad, who oversaw a brutal 1982 crackdown on the opposition. The tribunal ruled that the assets were obtained through organized laundering of stolen public funds. Human rights activist William Bourdon, who brought the case to a court in Paris, said money in tax havens such as Dubai and Russia would be much harder to recover. Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother, Maher, commanded Syria’s Fourth Armored Division, which, according to the US State Department, smuggled captagon to other countries in the Middle East. Profits from the drug have helped the regime mitigate the effects of tough Western economic sanctions over the years, bringing in an average of about $2.4 billion annually in 2020-2022.