U.S. Freezes $32 Billion in Gaddafi Bank Accounts; U.K. Adds $19 Billion

Within days of the February 2011 protests in Benghazi turning into open conflict, the U.S. and U.K. moved to lock down the Gaddafi family's external assets. President Obama's Executive Order 13566, signed February 25, 2011, blocked the property and interests of Muammar Gaddafi, four of his sons, and senior regime officials, with implementation through Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Reports that week that OFAC had frozen approximately $32 billion in U.S.-jurisdictionally-held Libyan assets — much of it Libyan Investment Authority funds parked in U.S. banks — represented one of the largest single asset-freeze actions OFAC had executed up to that point.

The U.K. action operated through the Treasury's financial-sanctions framework rather than executive order, and the £12-billion / $19-billion figure circulating in early March covered Libyan sovereign assets in U.K. financial institutions — primarily LIA holdings, including its stake in Pearson, its real-estate holdings, and various deposit accounts. The EU sanctions framework, adopted in parallel, extended the blocking action across all member states.

The frozen assets sat in dispute for years afterwards. The post-2011 transitional Libyan governments contested ownership against various private claimants and foreign-jurisdiction creditors; some accounts remained frozen into the late 2010s pending UN-level decisions on transitional governance. The 2011 freeze remains a textbook reference for sovereign-asset action in active-conflict situations.