The Libyan Government has charged Prince Laurent of Belgium with “extortion”, reports from media inside the country have claimed.
It is the latest chapter of an ongoing feud between the Prince, who is the younger brother of King Philippe, and the Libyan regime that began after a deal between an NGO linked to the prince and the country’s investment authority turned sour some 12 years ago.
This has now resulted in Libya charging the Prince with “fraud and extortion”, with authorities within the African nation claiming that Laurent somehow rigged multiple court cases between the two parties.
According to a report by the Belgian outlet HLN, the row started after the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) unilaterally cancelled a reforestation project arranged with the prince’s Global Sustainable Development Trust (GSDT) more than a decade ago.
The NGO then successfully sued the LIA over the project’s cancellation, with a Brussels court ruling in 2015 that the Libyan authority owed the GSDT €50 million.
The Libyan Government has now responded by accusing the Belgian courts of corruption, alleging that the prince managed to illegally put “unacceptable pressure” on civil proceedings.
“The criminal complaint we have filed accuses Prince Laurent of fraud and extortion,” a lawyer for the LIA has reportedly said.
“Furthermore, we allege that Prince Laurent used undue influence to attempt to pressure our client into paying him a large sum of money for a dispute that we believe had nothing to do with our client.”
The organisation’s CEO Mohammed Hassan, meanwhile, claimed that his government organisation had “no choice but to start a criminal case against Prince Laurent” over the fiasco.
Responding to the charges, the Belgian prince branded the charges as “nonsense”.
“It’s very simple: Libya has to repay my non-profit organisation €50 million and they don’t want that,” he said.
He went on to say that the LIA had been proven to be in the wrong “nine times in a row” in the Belgian court and that its accusations of corruption were “not possible”.
“Anyone who knows the legal process in Belgium knows that it is impossible that I could influence a judge. Impossible!” Prince Laurent said.
He went on to accuse the Libyan authorities of “attacking” him “in a ridiculous way”.
