WASHINGTON: Muammar Gaddafi secretly salted away more than $US200 billion ($193 billion) in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world before he was killed, according to senior Libyan officials.
That's about $US30,000 for every Libyan citizen, and double the amount that Western governments previously estimated.
The new estimates of the deposed dictator's hidden cash, gold reserves and investments are ''staggering'', one person who has studied records of the asset search said. ''No one truly appreciated the scope of it.''
If the values prove accurate, Gaddafi will go down in history as one of the most rapacious, as well as one of the most bizarre, world leaders, on a scale with the late Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo or the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
Revelations of the stunning size of the portfolio are sure to anger Libyans, about one-third of whom live in poverty.
And it is likely to spur an effort to return the money to Libya's transitional government, which says it wants to embark on ambitious plans to modernise the country after nearly 42 years of being ruled by Gaddafi's whim.
During his time in power, Gaddafi steered aid and investments to benefit his own family and tribe, but denied support for much of the country, especially for the eastern region that historically resisted his family's despotic grip on power.
Gaddafi's death, after he was captured by revolutionary fighters on Thursday outside the coastal town of Sirte his birthplace, not only ended the armed uprising that erupted in February, it also sets the stage for other governments to begin repatriating a bonanza in sequestered assets to the oil-rich but cash-poor nation.
Obama administration officials were stunned last spring when they found $US37 billion in Libyan regime accounts and investments in the US, and quickly froze the assets before Gaddafi or his aides could move them.
Governments in France, Italy, England and Germany seized control of another $US30 billion or so. Investigators estimated that Gaddafi had stashed perhaps another $US30 billion elsewhere in the world, for a total of about $US100 billion.
But subsequent investigations by American, European and Libyan authorities determined Gaddafi secretly sent tens of billions more abroad over the years and made, sometimes lucrative, investments in nearly every major country, including much of the Middle East and south-east Asia, officials said.
Most of the money was under the name of government institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority, the Libyan Foreign Bank, the Libyan National Oil Corp and the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio.
Investigators said Gaddafi and his family could have accessed the money if they had chosen to do so.
Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa.