IRA victims deserve Gaddafi cash, say MPs

THE Government should give hundreds of thousands of pounds in returns on Colonel Gaddafi’s frozen UK investments to relatives of IRA bombings which used Libya-supplied Semtex, MPs have said.

Ministers have detailed for the first time the scale of the assets held by the UK Government since the Libyan dictator was killed a decade ago.

The news comes after William Shawcross, who produced a report on the assets for the Government last year, was dramatically summoned to appear in front of MPs next week.

Ministers have refused so far to publish the report.

The sums amassed by the former Libyan dictator amount to £12.1 billion in 2017, falling to £11.2billion in 2018 and £11.8billion in 2019, roughly the same as the Home Office’s budget.

Pressure is now growing on ministers to use returns on the investments – which are governed by the same law that has frozen the Libyan assets – to compensate victims of IRA bombs.

Analysis suggests that the investments would have generated returns of £483,000, £500,000 and £572,000 in each of the three years if they were held in a FTSE100 tracker fund.

DUP MP Ian Paisley said last night: “This staggering amount of money ought to be used to compensate without further delay those individuals who suffered at the hands of Gaddafi-sponsored IRA terrorism.”

He added: “It is immoral, and frankly unexplainable, why the Government has not been proactive in this regard.”

Mr Paisley also said that any tax paid on the sums should be used to support IRA victims.

Peers were told last month that £17million was paid to HM Treasury in tax from the assets in 2019 alone.

Jonathan Ganesh, who was severely injured in the IRA’s 1996 attack on the London Docklands, added: “HM Government should ... stand for all victims of terror in the UK by immediately releasing a percentage of the assets to those victims left severely disabled by the Gaddafi’s Semtex.”

A Government spokesman said: “Under international law, when assets are frozen, they continue to belong to the sanctioned individual or entity. They are not confiscated or transferred to HM Treasury.”