Posted on 01/21/2011 5:05:16 AM PST by Mikey_1962
The wife of Tunisia’s ousted president fled the chaos-stricken country with one-and-a-half tons of gold worth more than £35million, it emerged yesterday. Dubbed ‘the Imelda Marcos of the Arab world’ because of her lavish lifestyle and love of designer clothes, Leila Trabelsi is said to have demanded the gold last week as President Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali’s regime collapsed. The chief of Tunisia’s central bank initially refused but Ben Ali, 74, personally intervened, and she flew out with the bullion as she joined him in exile in Saudi Arabia. The source of the claim, leading Tunisian economist Moncef Cheikhrouhou, said militia men had tried to take more gold. The clan of the former first lady is widely despised as the ultimate symbol of corruption and excess. A former hairdresser, Mrs Ben Ali, 53, is known for her love of fast cars – the family had more than 50 – luxury homes and frequent shopping trips to Dubai, during which she is said to have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds. While many Tunisians faced unemployment, poor living conditions and oppression from Ben Ali’s brutal regime, his family – known as ‘The Mafia’ in the North African country’s capital Tunis – is said to have amassed a £3.5billion fortune. Much of it is kept in France, where some members of the family were still holed up last night.
The former president’s pregnant 24-year-old daughter Nesrine and her playboy husband Sakhr were taking cover in a series of suites in Disneyland Paris, together with a huge retinue of servants and bodyguards.
Dubbed the Tunisian Marie Antoinette, she used to fly luxury foods, including ice cream from St Tropez, to her beachside mansion by private jet while her husband kept a pet tiger, which he fed prime cuts of beef.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Kind of silly of them... everyone knows you can’t eat gold.
Poor thing - her back must be killing her.
We have missionary friends there; scary.
The so called Wikileaks-revolutions are spreading throughout the Arab world. Already Algeria, Yemen, and Jordan are having issues.
If this was Central Bank gold then Tunisia should demand it back from whatever bank is storing it. Looks like thievery to me
The bad part is it looks like Islamics are taking over this nation
Hmmm. This theme sounds eerily familiar...
I was just thinking the same thing...
Foreign dictators used to keep suitcases of U.S. dollars under their beds, now its gold. A sign of our times.
As many Americans are coming to realize: Gold is heavy but very easy to disperse and store. I highly doubt any of this Gold is in a bank.
For reference: a ton of Gold is a cube only ~ 15 inches on a side.
Let me guess.... and if I just contact her and send her my bank account number, she will give me 10 million?
Some forms of portable assets can get you into big trouble.
Ya might ought to check that math for a decimal place error.
Gold bars are about 7 X 3 5/8 X 1 /34 inches.
That’s about 730 cc (if *I* did the math correctly)
gold’s density is about 19.3 g/cc, so ...
730 cc X 19.3 g/cc divided by 454 g/pound = 31 pounds per gold bar, in round numbers.
That works out to about 96 standard gold bars.
Call that 5 wide by 4 deep and 5 high, minus one row or four.
Now for a sanity check, WHAT type of aircraft flew them out of the country.
1.5 tons is a non-trivial freight load.
Excellent reply, I am still laughing.
I can only fit about 77 gold bar equivalents into a 15” cube.
Math was never my strong suit, however.
cha-ching
Yeah, the overweight baggage fee is gonna’ be a bitch.
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