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The head of the Libyan central bank who controls billions of dollars in oil revenue said he and other senior bank staff had been forced to flee the country to “protect our lives” from potential attacks by armed militia.
The Central Bank of Libya and its governor Sadiq al-Kabir have been the focus of the latest political crisis that this week shut down most of the divided country’s oil production.
Tripoli-based Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, leader of one of two rival administrations in the east and west of the country mired in chaos since a 2011 Nato-backed uprising that toppled Muammer Gaddafi, has been pushing for the removal of Kabir.
Tensions between the two men have mounted, with Kabir accusing the prime minister of overspending and painting a misleadingly “rosy” picture of the economy in his speeches.
The stand-off came to a head this week when a committee from the Tripoli government took over the premises of the central bank in the coastal city. Armed groups then began intimidating staff into operating the institution, according to Kabir, who said he then fled to an undisclosed location.
“Militias are threatening and terrifying bank staff and are sometimes abducting their children and relatives to force them to go to work,” Kabir told the Financial Times in a telephone interview.
He also said attempts by Dbeibeh to replace him were illegal and not in conformity with accords negotiated by the UN that require agreement between the east and west governments on any new bank governor.
Most of Libya’s banking services have been suspended as the crisis has escalated and the central bank operations were disrupted.
Kabir has the support of the eastern-based parliament and of the rival administration in eastern Libya, which is dominated by warlord Khalifa Haftar. The eastern government responded to the takeover of the central bank by announcing the shutdown of oil production, most of which is in territory under the control of his forces.
About 750,000 barrels a day of Libyan oil production were offline on Thursday, according to research company Energy Aspects, which added that a further 250,000 b/d were at “imminent risk”. Libya pumped almost 1.2mn b/d of oil in July.
Tankers are still being loaded from Libya’s oil storage facilities in order for exports to continue, but Energy Aspects warned in a research note that key production sites were shutting down and the “outages could extend for months”.
While oil prices jumped more than 3 per cent on Monday on worries about the situation in the country, they have since fallen back to below the level they were at before the crisis began, with traders confident that the well-supplied market could cover any disruption. Benchmark Brent crude was trading at about $79 a barrel on Thursday, having been as high as $91 a barrel in early April.
For Libya, the escalating power struggle poses serious risks. “There are many dangers,” said Kabir. “The oil shutdown will have a negative impact on the economy and the value of the dinar. Also, there are tensions between forces on the ground in Tripoli which support and oppose the measure [to remove him]. So I fear it could lead to fighting.”
Kabir also said there were “valuable assets inside the central bank and we don’t know what is happening to them”.
Under UN security council resolutions, only the central bank in Tripoli is authorised to control and disburse the oil revenues. The UN and the US have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis.
Tim Eaton, senior research fellow at the Chatham House think-tank in London, said Kabir, who has been governor since 2012, had centralised enormous authority in his hands. As such, replacing him could be a challenge given that factions were jostling to gain increased access to the country’s oil revenues.
“It may end up being worse if the person who is appointed comes in and is weaker and is beholden to political interests,” he said, adding that the solution had to be about the bank “as an institution, and has to be about returning checks and balances”.
Eaton called for the formation of a “board which is technically capable and could start to dilute some of this power which has been monopolised in the [office] of the governor”.
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