Serving Libya nearly got me abducted

In January 2014, the 30-year-old Abdalla Kablan – an academic at the University of Malta who speaks fluent Maltese and who has lived most of his life here – survived an abduction attempt in Tripoli, where he was staying on official duty at the behest of Libyan prime minister Ali Zeidan.

Today, seated inside his university office, Kablan is at pains in recounting this ordeal. He demands that this episode in his life is not repeated anywhere, particularly since it could affect those close to him. As he recalls the event that sent him packing from the Libyan capital, Kablan is visibly in disquietude.

The brief chapter in Kablan’s life that nearly cost him his life happened towards the end of 2013, when Zeidan – today no longer prime minister, and now living in Geneva – found the Libyan PhD, a computational finance expert, in Malta, and asked him to lead an official, government campaign to track down and recover billions in cash that deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi had stashed away through vehicles like the Libyan Investment Authority.

“It was a mess, to say the least. I know that various government ministers and other leaders in the Transitional National Council, had issued some 20 mandates to various people to recover alleged assets and monies owned by the Gaddafis, on 10% commissions.

“It was simply anyone: private detectives, journalists, or simply people who claimed that they knew that Gaddafi had some money in Switzerland, for example. You would just go up to the minister, and he gives you a mandate to go and demand the cash. But which government is going to trust any Tom, Dick and Harry who comes knocking on their door demanding the return of Libyan money?”

Kablan scoffs at little victories like the £10 million London house, previously belonging to Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saadi Gaddafi, that the High Court in London returned to the Libyan state.

“I told them that a central, government-mandated authority had to deal with government authorities and financial institutions,” Kablan said, when he was discovered by Zeidan, who had learnt that the widely-published academic was living in Malta.

Kablan gave a presentation of how a central authority could employ computer science and quantitative mathematics to track down financial investments and the life cycle of capital.

“I have an extensive academic research track record in algorithmic trading, computational intelligence, machine learning, and finance with renowned academic journals, many of which won research awards. My plan was to have a government office that would be the official authority to go to other governments and banks, or attorneys general, to get the cash back. And not with some promise of 10% commission on the booty.

“Malta – and I have to say here that it has been one government that truly supported Libyan aspirations – was ready to cooperate, but it couldn’t just give out Libyan cash to someone claiming to have a mandate from a minister.”

In Kablan, Zeidan found a professional interlocutor who also could handle the computational forensics, data mining, and asset identification. But the minute he set up Tracing & Asset-Recovery Support Bureau (TARSB), Kablan ran into difficulty.

“As soon as I was appointed, the commissions and the mandates stopped, and that made many people unhappy. I was seen as an upstart, a young arriviste flown in from Malta. I was hated,” Kablan says.

His plan – never to reach fruition – was first to establish links with international organisations, Interpol, and the UN-World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR). StAR’s most important role is fostering ties between countries seeking looted money and those sitting on it: at the very basic level, fixing meetings between police and financial-intelligence experts.

Countries like Britain had formed task forces to work with Egypt; the United States’ Department of Justice has a “kleptocracy” unit, the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering

Section, to provide legal and policy assistance to foreign governments. The second stage would be an “in-reach” campaign – basically foster ties with Libya’s own institutions, such as the banks, the Central Bank, and the Libyan investment entities, to be able to check data, transfers and investments.

In the third stage, Kablan’s office would have started trawling the web, using artificial intelligence for an in-house exercise to effectively track down the money.

The problem was that there was nothing taking root.

“I didn’t even have a desk, let alone an office. All I had was a plan of action. I didn’t get paid, and I funded my own air fare!” Kablan laughs.

“The reality was that I was faced with a culture shock. Things got done slow in Tripoli, something totally different from the way we do things here. Everything was transitional, but it could have been handled better.”

Kablan says he was frustrated by  the inability to actually turn the TARSB into a central authority. “Malta was ready to transfer €100 million in Libyan funds. But that’s a big responsibility. If anything, Malta was keeping the Libyan people’s interests at heart by not just dishing out to anyone. Malta was confused: ‘how do we give it you,’ it asked the government?

“Being Maltese myself, I knew that people here were willing to give the money back. I cannot understand how Bloomberg thought it up to allege that Malta was being reticent in giving the money back,” Kablan says, annoyed at a recent exposé on Libya’s asset recovery efforts that gave him and Malta short shrift, if not sheer misrepresentation.

In ‘How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy’, Bloomberg claimed Gaddafi’s son Mutassim had €100 million in Maltese accounts, and suggested that the country was being difficult in letting the cash go. It then alleged that Kablan was only picked by Zeidan for being the son-in-law of foreign minister Mohammed Abdelaziz – but Kablan is not even married, nor is he dating Abdelaziz’s daughter. And it poured a dark shadow on him by saying that he had worked for Exante, a finance firm in Malta that also acts as a broker for Bitcoin, “the virtual currency favoured by drug dealers and money launderers.”

“Zeidan simply wanted to appoint an independent person of integrity with proven technical competence to help Libya recover its money. I accepted this challenging appointment not solely for professional reasons but also because I wished to offer my skills for the reconstruction of the country of my father and forefathers after the turmoil it went through during the 2011 revolution.

“Obviously somebody has it in for me because I had the Wall Street Journal and a French newspaper enquire with me on the same allegations – Bloomberg just went ahead and published it. And this is what gets me, because having lived in Malta all my life I had no political allegiances, no agenda, and I was conscious of the fact that Libya should not send shockwaves to the European banking system by draining the cash out in one fell swoop.

While the Gaddafi mansion in London perhaps symbolises the Libyan effort in tracking down its diverted funds, Kablan says that “nobody really knows” what could be out there in financial derivatives, futures and foreign investments. “You need computer intelligence to track it down.”

When Zeidan set up the TARSB in August 2013 to hunt down the assets held by Libya’s sovereign funds, such as the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) and LAFICO, cooperation was already underway with Interpol, the World Bank, France and Britain, and the United States’ attorney general.

Eventually the TARSB was besieged by internal politics: the LIA was intent on recovering the hidden assets itself, while another unit called the Asset Recovery Committee (ARC) appointed by former prime minister Abdul Rahim Al Keeb, wanted to recover the assets itself.

If there’s an idea of the kind of governance basket-case that made Libya dysfunctional from day one of TNC rule, it’s the cash payouts of $2,400 to every family from the national treasury, an outlay of billions that soon became the order of the day: militiamen would walk into ministries demanding cash, an enduring image being the kidnapping of Ali Zeidan himself. The other fatal error for Libya was the inability to get rebels to hand in their weapons, with militias stopping everyone in the street and asking for identification.

Kablan, in the meantime, had packed his bags in January 2014: an abduction attempt right in broad daylight meant that Tripoli was not safe for him. It’s an ordeal that weighs heavily on him.

Much of the old Libya under Gaddafi, the stunted and topsy-turvy bureaucracy, and the violence that became the order of the day, was enough to spit out someone like Kablan.

“You have a country that’s been relatively closed off for decades, and suspicious of outside influence. There is a culture of exclusion that is not ready for certain people. It’s sad really, I would have loved to see the country flourish.”

Who is Abdalla Kablan?

Abdalla Kablan is a 30 year old computational finance expert with a PhD degree in Computational Finance from University of Essex, UK.

A published academic in the area of computational finance and a practitioner too, Kablan specialises in an interdisciplinary field that utilizes different advanced techniques such as computer science, analytics, data analysis, forensic modelling, and quantitative mathematics for different applications ranging from financial investments to the tracing of the life cycle of capital in order to anticipate and forecast different movements in assets or capital.

He has an extensive academic research publications track record in the areas of algorithmic trading, computational intelligence, Machine Learning, and Finance with renowned academic journals, many of which won research awards.

Kablan also has an MSc in Financial Engineering and Knowledge Management from the University of Bradford, UK, and a Bsc I.T degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Malta.