The widow of deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has filed an appeal against a decision by a Maltese court to release over €94 million held in Bank of Valletta accounts in favour of the Libyan state.
The appeal was filed by Maltese lawyer Louis Cassar Pullicino on behalf of the Gaddafi heirs’ lawyer, Charilos Oikonomopoulos and Gaddafi’s widow, Safiya Ferkash Mohammed.
Their main bone of contention is that the Maltese courts lacked jurisdiction and could not decide the case over the funds.
The legal battle started a year after Gaddafi’s violent overthrow and death in 2011. Gaddafi’s son, Mutassim was discovered to be the owner of a Maltese-registered company with BOV accounts. Upon Mutassim’s death in Misurata on October 20, 2011, at the height of the uprising against his father’s regime, various credit cards issued by BOV were found in his possession.
According to Libyan law, as an army officer, Mutassim had been precluded from drawing benefits from any business interests.
Moreover, he had failed to submit a full declaration of assets as prescribed by the laws of his country.
Litigation was taken up in the Maltese courts, with the Libyan state accusing BOV of failing to carry out proper due diligence checks that should have prevented Gaddafi opening an account in the first place.
The Libyan government has always viewed the funds, held under a Maltese company called Capital Resources Limited, as illicit gains.
Despite arguments that the money was private funds, not money pilfered from the Libyan state, Mr Justice Neville Camilleri last month ordered that the funds be released in favour of the Libyan state.
The Gaddafi heirs argued that the Maltese courts lacked jurisdiction, that Libyan laws invoked by the state of Libya in this case were purely penal in nature and that no criminal process in the Libyan penal courts were ever instituted against Mutassim Gaddafi or his heirs.
They also argued that the Maltese courts were asked to grant the state of Libya a remedy pursuant to a foreign penal law when it is a well-established principle of private international law that a domestic court cannot apply the penal law of a foreign state to grant a remedy.
Maltese lawyer Shaheryar Ghaznavi represented the Libyan state in their attempts to repatriate the cash.