Enrico Monfrini: The cheerful Swiss lawyer whom dictators fear

Enrico Monfrini has been called "the man who dictators fear the most". He is renowned for his skill in tracking down billions of dollars salted away by corrupt leaders and their cronies. His most celebrated case which opened the door to similar actions worldwide was restoring more than $1bn snatched from Nigeria by its former leader General Sani Abacha. Currently unravelling the affairs of the Haitian tyrant Papa Doc' Duvalier, Monfrini won't talk about forthcoming assignments, observes the BBC World Service. But he's "keeping a keen eye on events in the Middle East".

It's dangerous work and Monfrini a cheerful-looking Swiss lawyer in his mid-sixties is often on the receiving end of threats. These typically come from Western professionals rather than their clients. "I might get a phone call or a visit from a lawyer from Paris or London who would say: Enrico, you should be more careful. That person didn't like what you did to him and he's known to be rather violent'." But, as Monfrini told the FT: "If you are afraid, you can't do this job." Meanwhile, he has built his own trusted network of friends around the world journalists, politicians, policemen, prosecutors and bankers. "If you want to get sexy information, you can only get it from people you trust, and who trust you."

His career could have been very different. "I wanted to be a farmer and grow crops." But his father (a diplomat, first in Gabon and then in the Ivory Coast) was having none of it. "So I became a lawyer." In the 1990s, while Abacha was still in power, he represented several senior opposition leaders, says Swiss Info. When they took power "they wanted someone they could trust to pursue the money and asked me".

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Hunting down the stolen cash was tortuous work. "I began with very few details and only found empty bank accounts." But he made such a nuisance of himself that the Swiss authorities caved in and upheld his request to freeze any account linked to the Abacha family, immediately yielding $650m. The real legwork came in stripping down the accounts to find a web of offshore firms and prising the cash out of them (see box). It's forensic work. "You need to be able to act as a lawyer and an accountant," says Monfrini, a process made harder because his adversaries are usually other lawyers.

Still, he knows he's on the winning side. "The Abacha case opened up a road that will become a motorway. Give the world another ten years and you will see the end of all these old thieves," he says. "I meet a lot of strange and crooked people, but I also meet a lot of straightforward and important people who want the world to change. We're seeing many dictators fall now and it is becoming harder for them to steal fortunes because people like me will hunt them down."

How Monfrini tracks down dictators' billions

According to the World Bank, some $20bn-$40bn is siphoned off every year by corrupt leaders and governments and hidden in bank accounts around the world. A good deal of it, says Siri Schubert on PBS, started out as aid. During his 15-year reign of terror, the Haitian dictator, Papa Doc' Duvalier, regularly pocketed millions as Monfrini has discovered. In December 1980 alone, the International Monetary Fund granted $22m to Haiti. $20m of that was immediately withdrawn from government bank accounts even as a third of Haitian children died before the age of five.

The trail for the missing loot often begins in Switzerland. Recent moves by the government to clean up its act including a new law on the restitution of assets mean banks are wary of accepting funds directly from political leaders. But they often wind up here anyway, in the form of accounts "created by firms whose shareholders are listed in the British Virgin Islands or Panama", says Monfrini. "A launderer will systematically split a large sum into irregular amounts $7.23m, say and send these to other banks, before regathering everything in final places." Typical havens include Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and the Bahamas.

Finding the cash is one thing, but "the hardest part" is confiscating the funds and repatriating them. Some countries refuse to help, others don't have laws that allow it, he says. Has Monfrini ever been tempted to switch sides? "I know lawyers who launder money and they make more than I do." But a sense of injustice drives him on. "I cannot stand the profound injustices committed by corrupt leaders despotic thieves who steal huge sums of money while the rest of the population lives in misery." Much of the $1bn he recovered for Nigeria was used to build hospitals and roads under World Bank supervision. For Monfrini, notes Swiss Info, that "had a kind of symbolism".