Israel Matzav

Would you pay $1 million to hear her sing?

Based on material previously reported in the media, and on documents made public by Wikileaks, the New York Times reports that a son of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi paid $1 million to Mariah Carey for singing four songs at a party on the Caribbean Island of St. Bart's in January 2009.

After New Year’s Day 2009, Western media reported that Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, had paid Mariah Carey $1 million to sing just four songs at a bash on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.

In the newspaper he controlled, Seif indignantly denied the report — the big spender, he said, was his brother, Muatassim, Libya’s national security adviser, according to an American diplomatic cable from the capital, Tripoli.

It was Muatassim, too, the cable said, who had demanded $1.2 billion in 2008 from the chairman of Libya’s national oil corporation, reportedly to establish his own militia. That would let him keep up with yet another brother, Khamis, commander of a special-forces group that “effectively serves as a regime protection unit.”

As the Qaddafi clan conducts a bloody struggle to hold onto power in Libya, cables obtained by WikiLeaks offer a vivid account of the lavish spending, rampant nepotism and bitter rivalries that have defined what a 2006 cable called “Qadhafi Incorporated,” using the State Department’s preference from the multiple spellings for Libya’s troubled first family.

The glimpses of the clan’s antics in recent years that have reached Libyans despite Col. Qaddafi’s tight control of the media have added to the public anger now boiling over. And the tensions between siblings could emerge as a factor in the chaos in the oil-rich African country.

Read the whole thing.

When it's all shaken out, I suspect that Gadhafi has embezzled enough money to make Hosni Mubarak look like a peon. Of course, the fact that he's gone murdering his own people makes it likely that the Swiss banks will be much more cooperative about tracking down his ill-begotten gains than they have been about Mubarak's (although I read somewhere recently that they did put a freeze on Mubarak's assets).

By the way, Khamis is the brother who has been hiring the mercenaries along with Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa (no, I didn't make up that name).

Labels: Hosni Mubarak, Khamis Gadhaffi, Libyan regime change, Muammar Gaddafi, Musa Kusa, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:42 PM