How am I not surprised.... The wife got control of millions in swiss bank accounts.
Arafat was out of it for quite a while in Howard Hughes mode while the wife siphoned the accounts to banks she controlled.
Who else gets the booty? Arafat died in 2004 from a mystery illness
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/12/1076548163989.htmlArafat's wife at centre of money-laundering inquiryFebruary 13, 2004
French public prosecutors have opened a money-laundering inquiry into suspect transfers totalling about 9 million euros ($15 million) into Paris bank accounts held by the wife of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
The preliminary inquiry, which will determine whether a full investigation is warranted, was launched after the Bank of France and Tracfin, the French anti-laundering agency, noticed
regular payments of about �1 million a month entering Suha Arafat's accounts. An official said the
money, from "a Swiss institution", was paid into two separate accounts at the Arab Bank and the Banque Nationale de Paris in the name of Mrs Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter Zahwa and Yasser Arafat's mother, Raymonda Tawil.
Mrs Arafat is also said to receive about $US100,000 ($127,000) a month from the Palestinian Authority.
The inquiry, which began last October, is confined to payments between July 2002 and July 2003, he said, although the transfers started about a year earlier.
....
Investigators from the European Union's anti-fraud office are in Jerusalem examining the authority's accounts after
allegations last year that part of about �350 million in aid to Palestine may have been misappropriated.
The EU's concerns arise mainly from an audit of
the authority's finances carried out last year by the International Monetary Fund. Last September, the chief auditor,
Karim Nashashibi, alleged that as much as $US900 million had been diverted between 1995 and 2000 into "a special account controlled by Yasser Arafat". The Palestinian Authority called accusations of money laundering "scandalous". Mr Arafat has always rejected allegations of corruption in the Authority. Yet in recent years it has suffered a fall in foreign donor money amid allegations that some of the cash has been siphoned off by corrupt officials or diverted to militants carrying out the suicide bombing campaign against Israel.
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[ How is she NOT surprised that he was piosoned?>
ha ha ha ] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/07/arafats-wife-wants-body-exhumed-in-light-of-poison-reports/1Arafat's wife wants body exhumed in light of poison reports....
Suha Arafat also said she long suspected that her husband, who died unexpectedly in 2004 following a sudden illness, was poisoned, Al-Jazeera reports.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suha_ArafatSuha Arafat born Suha Daoud Tawil, is the widow of former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
...
Suha was born in the West Bank in 1963 into an
affluent Christian family who lived in Nablus and then Ramallah (both cities under Jordanian authority at the time). Suha's father
Daoud Tawil, an Oxford-educated banker, was born in Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv).
Hillary Clinton kissing Suha Arafat, for which she later received a lot of criticism.
Suha converted to Islam and secretly married Arafat on 17 July 1990, when she was aged 27 and he was 61. She later declared that she became a Muslim "for political purposes. Their only child, daughter Zahwa, was born on 24 July 1995 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Zahwa was named after Arafat’s mother.[6]
In 2004, when Arafat was dying in a Paris hospital, she talked to him in an attempt to bring him out of his coma.
Arafat died on 11 November 2004http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat...
In August 2002, the Israeli Military Intelligence Chief alleged that Arafat's personal wealth was in the range of USD $1.3 billion.[5]
In 2003 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted an audit of the PNA and stated that Arafat diverted $900 million in public funds to a special bank account controlled by Arafat and the PNA Chief Economic Financial adviser. However, the IMF did not claim that there were any improprieties, and it specifically stated that most of the funds had been used to invest in Palestinian assets, both internally and abroad.[108][109]
However in 2003, a team of American accountants–hired by Arafat's own finance ministry–began examining Arafat's finances; this team reached a different conclusion.
The team claimed that part of the Palestinian leader's wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion, with investments in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company and venture capital funds in the US and the Cayman Islands. The head of the investigation stated that "although the money for the portfolio came from public funds like Palestinian taxes,
virtually none of it was used for the Palestinian people; it was all controlled by Arafat. And none of these dealings were made public."[110]
An investigation conducted by the General Accounting Office reported that
Arafat and the PLO held over $10 billion in assets even at the time when he was publicly claiming bankruptcy.[111]
Although Arafat lived a modest lifestyle, Dennis Ross, former Middle East negotiator for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, stated that
Arafat's "walking-around money" financed a vast patronage system known as neopatrimonialism.
According to Salam Fayyad—a former World Bank official whom Arafat appointed Finance Minister of the PNA in 2002—Arafat's commodity monopolies could accurately be seen as gouging his own people, "especially in Gaza which is poorer, which is something that is totally unacceptable and immoral." Fayyad claims that Arafat used $20 million from public funds to pay the leadership of the PNA security forces (the Preventive Security Service) alone.[110]
Fuad Shubaki, former financial aide to Arafat, told the Israeli security service Shin Bet that
Arafat used several million dollars of aid money to buy weapons and support militant groups.[112] During Israel's Operation Defensive Shield, the Israel army recovered counterfeit money and documents from Arafat's Ramallah headquarters. The documents showed that, in 2001, Arafat personally approved payments to Tanzim terrorists.[113] The Palestinians claimed that the counterfeit money was confiscated from criminal elements.[114
....
