PARIS — Mobutu Sese Seko may have given up his power, but during three decades the dictator who promised his impoverished African land that he would live on his soldier's pay salted away a vast secret fortune often estimated at as much as $5 billion.
That huge sum would make him richer than well-known tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch or Ross Perot. It would give Zaire's longtime ruler the same assessed value as many Fortune 500 corporations.
During Mobutu's years in power, Zaire's treasury was plundered, foreign aid--including U.S. taxpayer money channeled through the CIA and other agencies--siphoned off, economic assets such as copper mines and cocoa plantations embezzled from, and bribes demanded and obtained.
The former army general appeared to consider his country--the repository of vast deposits of diamonds, timber, copper, cobalt and other natural resources--to be his private plantation.
"I owe Zaire nothing," Mobutu has said. "It's Zaire that owes me everything."
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A few years ago, an employee of a U.N. agency based in Geneva recalled, there was an army revolt in Zaire, and Mobutu's position looked shaky. That night, the employee recalled, he heard the droning of an airplane.
It was the Zairian presidential jet, he later learned, ferrying in a last-minute shipment of coffee for sale in Europe.
"Mobutu could just never steal enough," the employee said. "He had to have every last bean."
Mobutu himself told a reporter for Time magazine in 1993 that his available funds "amounted to no more than $10 million." But that, Mobutu said, did not include foreign real estate holdings or nonliquid assets.
On Friday, hours before the cancer-stricken 66-year-old left Kinshasa, Switzerland ordered a freeze on his luxury villa in Savingy near Lausanne, which local tax authorities valued at $2.75 million.
The Swiss property includes a large house, swimming pools, garages, a tree-fringed pond and a small chalet nestled in a garden.
Under the Swiss order, the estate in the canton of Vaud now cannot be sold or transferred until further notice. The rebels fighting Mobutu had asked that his assets in the country be impounded.
But the decision by Swiss authorities did not affect any of Mobutu's bank assets that still may be in the country, which at one time were believed to total about $4 billion. And he has plenty of other properties elsewhere.
