Tunisia retrieves $28m of Laila Trabelsi's wealth

The Tunisian Central Bank governor, Mostafa Kamal al-Nabli, has revealed that the country has succeeded in retrieving $28 million from a bank account owned by Laila al-Trabelsi, wife of ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. "The money will be transferred to Tunisia in a week's time from the Lebanese-Canadian Bank in Lebanon," said the governor. The Lebanese Central Bank had declared last May that it was freezing its bank accounts owned by Ben Ali's wife. Since Ben Ali's ousting on January 14 last year, Tunisia has submitted official requests to unfreeze the bank accounts owned by the former president and his family members. Although a lot of countries have said they are willing to help, particularly the US and the EU countries, Tunisian officials have admitted that legal obstacles were impeding the process. The Tunisian Central Bank Governor confirmed this in a session held by the Constituent Assembly. Al-Nabli said that some judicial requests which were sent to certain countries were rejected,  as they did not conform to the laws of the countries, while some Tunisian figures who were involved in corruption succeeded in preventing their accounts from being frozen by submitting appeals to the judiciaries of the countries they were living in. Al-Nabli revealed that the national committee tasked with retrieving the smuggled money had assigned a Swiss firm to represent the Tunisian government in the retrieval requesats submitted to the Western countries, saying the decision "intended to support the judicial and diplomatic efforts of Tunisia to retrieve at least some of this money". Judge Mohammed al-Askari, the Justice Ministry's representative in the smuggled money retrieval committee, told a national radio station on Wednesday that "Tunisia doesn't find help from the authorities of Qatar and the UAE to track the smuggled money of Ben Ali and his relatives."