Arafat diverted 1bn in funds to ensure survival
Jim Prince and a team of American accountants are combing through Arafat's books, and say there is a lot more money yet to be accounted for.
So far, Prince's team has determined that part of the Palestinian leader's wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion with investments in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company and venture capital funds in the US and the Cayman Islands.
Although the money for the portfolio came from public funds like Palestinian taxes, virtually none of it was used for the Palestinian people, and, Prince says, none of these dealings were made public.
"Our whole point is to bring it out of control of any one person," Prince says.
The portfolio money is now under the control of Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official who Arafat was forced to appoint finance minister last year after crowds began protesting his corrupt regime.
"There is corruption out there. There is abuse. There is impropriety, and that's what had to be fixed," said Fayyad.
Fayyad said Arafat paid his security forces alone $20 million a month, all of it in cash.
All told, US officials estimate Arafat's personal nest egg at between $1 billion and $3 billion.
Although Arafat lives in his Ramallah compound, which the Israelis all but reduced to rubble a year-and-a-half ago, according to Israeli officials, his wife, Suha gets $100,000 a month from Arafat out of the Palestinian budget, and lives lavishly in Paris on this allowance.
Mohammed Rachid, Arafat's economic adviser who set up his tangled web of investments and monopolies, says he's cooperating with Fayyad's investigators. Rachid left the Palestinian territories about a year ago under a cloud. "I'm proud of what I did till now," Rachid says. "I think I showed a good performance."
The funds Arafat collected when he was chairman of the PLO in exile are still missing.
