Take the money and run

From 'Personal Finance for Dictators: Where to Stash the Cash' by Graham Bowley in the New York Times of 12 March, regarding the slowdown in regime change in Libya -

The former Philippine first lady, Imelda R. Marcos, and her three children were charged with removing 22 crates of Philippine pesos from the country when they fled to Hawaii in 1986.

In Haiti, President Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michele, withdrew at least $33 million from the country’s central bank, transferring it to foreign accounts, and may have stored some money and jewelry in a safe-deposit box at a Citibank branch on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, according to court papers filed by the Haitian government after he was forced from power in 1986.

The Panamanian dictator, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, was reported to have stashed $5.8 million in denominations of 10s, 20s, 50s and 100s in a file cabinet behind a desk at his home. United States authorities seized the money during the invasion of Panama in 1989.

In 1997, shortly before the forces of Laurent Kabila took power in Congo, formerly called Zaire, aides close to former President Mobutu Sese Seko smuggled crates of diamonds and more than $40 million in cash out of the country on a jet chartered by the South African government, according to The Sunday Independent, a South African newspaper.

Then, in 2003, in the hours before American bombs began falling on Baghdad, one of President Saddam Hussein’s sons, Qusay Saddam Hussein, was said by officials to carry off nearly $1 billion in cash from the vaults of the country’s Central Bank.

The volume of cash was so great — some $900 million in American $100 bills and as much as $100 million worth of euros — that a team of workers took two hours to load the money on three tractor-trailers.