In the months after the "Arab spring", rumours swirled in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia that every household would gain a slice of looted public funds prised from the grasp of their former leaders and the cronies who surrounded them. Hossam Issa, a prominent academic and at the time deputy head of the Nasserist Party, said the deposed President Hosni Mubarak's ill-gotten gains had been "a daily insult for 30 years...now I have hope." International anti-corruption campaigners looked forward to a promising new front opening in the global war on graft. Estimates of the loot range widely, reflecting the murkiness of offshore finance, but the talk is of tens of billions of dollars. Sani Abacha of Nigeria, often taken to epitomise venality, pilfered between $5 billion and $8 billion. But sometimes optimism overtakes reality: the upper, $70 billion, estimate of the amount siphoned off by Egypt's Mubarak clan may just be on the high side.
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