The opposition Interim Transitional National Council (TNC) has been operating off money in the central bank and other private and public banks in rebel-held eastern Libya, said Ali Tarhouni, 60, a senior economics lecturer at the University of Washington before he rushed home to serve the opposition as minister of finance, oil and economics.
“We’re running out of that money,” he told msnbc.com in an interview in Washington, D.C., confirming a Reuters report that the opposition had three to four weeks of funds left. “No money is coming in from outside so far.”…
“We’re faced with the same sanctions as Gadhafi,” he said, referring to U.S. sanctions that have frozen more than $34 billion of Libyan government assets, in addition to U.N. and European sanctions. “I don’t have access to any foreign exchange to cover any purchases, open lines of credits to merchants, so that’s a very challenging aspect to what I do.”
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