The Battle for Control of the Central Bank of Libya (And it's foreign reserves)

NYT reports:

The Central Bank of Libya is the great prize at the center of the escalating armed conflicts that have consumed the country since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi more than three years ago...

The central bank is the repository for Libya’s oil revenue and holds nearly $100 billion in foreign reserves...

he central bank has sought to remain neutral and above the fray. It has continued to pay for fuel and food subsidies as well as the salaries of bureaucrats, doctors, teachers, local officials and millions of other public employees — often regardless of whether they showed up for work.

By financing the budgets of the Interior and Defense Ministries, the same bank has even provided salaries and supplies for thousands of fighters battling one another from all sides of the struggle...

Its most direct challenge has come from the Tobruk-Bayda government. It includes a recently elected Parliament, but it is under the de facto control of Gen. Khalifa Hifter, who defected from Colonel Qaddafi’s military and last year announced a military takeover pledging to rid the country of violent extremists.

The Tobruk-Bayda government has sought since October to replace the central bank’s chairman, Sadik el-Kaber, a veteran banker, in order to take control of the bank’s assets. But Mr. Kaber has refused to resign. He has kept the bank’s headquarters in Tripoli, the nominal capital, which is controlled by a rival coalition of moderate Islamists, extremists and militias from the coastal city of Misurata...

The nature of the challenge changed late Wednesday night, when some of General Hifter’s fighters invaded the bank’s building in Benghazi, near the front lines of a continuing fight with local Islamist militants.

By Thursday morning, the fighters had posted video online that showed them in control of the premises but refraining, so far, from breaking into the vaults...

In a statement on Thursday, the central bank condemned the seizure of the Benghazi branch as “a heinous crime” and warned of “dangerous consequences that it could bring at home and abroad.”

-RW