Russia meets fresh allegations of flooding Libyan markets with counterfeit banknotes in another bid to additionally destabilize the country. The Kremlin has a demonstrated history of sending phoney currency to Libyan National Army (LNA) leader Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. The Central Bank of Libya (CBL) reported in April 2024 that it began withdrawing the foremost and second prints of 50-dinar (just more than $10) banknotes from circulation after officials found counterfeit prints.
Russia is blamed for printing the fake money at a farm on the outskirts of Benghazi, Haftar’s base. Russia’s Wagner Group of mercenaries now comprehended as the Africa Corps supports the LNA. The CBL asked banks in Libya and their branches to permit the public to present the banknotes and deposit them in their accounts. It encouraged banks to exercise due diligence to prevent counterfeit currency from being handed and it published a presentation that demonstrated the minute differences between legitimate and counterfeit 50-dinar prints.
The country is split between Haftar’s government in Benghazi and Libya’s internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which Haftar is endeavouring to overthrow. Jalel Harchaoui, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, expressed that Haftar has intensified efforts to maintain his ties with the Kremlin since August 2023.
“It’s important to stress that Russia’s assistance to Haftar rarely comes without financial demands,” Harchaoui informed to The New Arab. “Haftar is always required to cover the expenses incurred by the Russians active on Libyan soil — in military and other domains.”
A $150 million conflict between Haftar and Wagner emerged in 2020 after an agreement between the parties ended. Haftar was blamed for not paying the group after the United forces lost seven cities over 24 hours in 2019, the year the warlord established a sustained assault on Tripoli that ultimately failed.
At the time, Wagner was obtaining “fighters — not so experienced — from Syria, Belarus and Serbia,” a military source near Haftar stated in a report by the Arabic Post news website.
In September 2019, five months into Haftar’s raid on Tripoli, Malta officials intercepted a shipment of Russian-made dinars on the path to Haftar. Nearly 4.5 billion dinars were dispatched from Russia to the eastern port city of Tobruk in the first half of 2019, overlapping with the start of the Tripoli war, Reuters reported. Another billion dinars was returned to the east in 2016, according to the Libya Herald.
Legitimate Libyan dinars administered by the GNA in Tripoli are printed in the United Kingdom. Joint Stock Company Goznak, a Russian state-owned enterprise, printed the illegitimate bills grabbed in 2019 and 2020. As with the current crop of counterfeit cash, the earlier fake Libyan dinar bills looked almost similar to official bills. By some estimates, Haftar’s government inundated the country with nearly 12 billion Russian-made dinars between 2015 and 2020.
The fake banknotes were utilised to pay Haftar’s fighters and were seen all over the country. They fueled inflation, drove down the weight of the dinar, and undermined the official currency provided by the central bank in Tripoli, according to Libyan economic analyst Mukhtar Al Jadeed. The primary objective of the counterfeit currency was to “support the war on Tripoli,” Al Jadeed told Al-Jazeera. Officials thwarted a shipment of $1.1 billion in fake dinars bound for Haftar in Malta in the spring of 2020.
