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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Here's 15 of Mubarak's billions

This document, apparently from a Swiss bank, is going around the Arabic web. It appears to show Hosni Mubarak deposited about 15,600 kg of platinum in a Swiss bank only one year after entering office:


According to this document, the value of the platinum was nearly $15 billion.

 (CAVEAT: I'm having trouble reconciling the numbers; I think that 15K kg of platinum is worth only about $1 billion today, but the only other way I can read the fuzzy document is that he deposited 15 million kg, which would have been worth more than $170 billion at the time and a trillion dollars today - platinum was at $358 a troy ounce in December 1982. So perhaps this document is forged.)

Given that Egypt does not have much of an oil economy, and assuming this document is legit, this sure makes it look like he was stealing from his people, big time.