Libya’s central bank chief flees country over militia threats: Report
Al Jazeera
Tripoli-based Presidential Council appoints new board of directors, with banking operations suspended amid upheaval.
Libya’s central bank Governor Sadiq al-Kabir says he and other senior employees of the institution have been forced to flee the country to escape threats from armed militia, the Financial Times reported.
“Militias are threatening and terrifying bank staff and are sometimes abducting their children and relatives to force them to go to work,” said al-Kabir in a telephone interview the newspaper published on Friday.
The Central Bank of Libya, which controls billions of dollars in oil revenue, is at the centre of the latest political crisis to hit a country riven with conflict since the 2011 NATO-backed overthrow of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi, which is now divided between two rival administrations in the east and west.
This latest spat between the two administrations escalated on Monday, when Tripoli-based Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, leading the internationally recognised Government of National Unity based in western Libya, attempted to remove al-Kabir, sending a delegation to take over the central bank governor’s office.
According to the FT report, tensions between the two men were mounting. Al-Kabir had accused the prime minister of “overspending and painting a misleadingly ‘rosy’ picture of the economy in his speeches”. Critics of the governor have accused him of mishandling oil revenues.
