‘Butcher of Hama’: Assad’s uncle used Guernsey fund manager to stash millions looted from Syria

The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has sent shockwaves around the world and marks the end of a dictatorship that has left the state in tatters. As well as brutal repression during the country’s decade-long civil war, the charges against the Assad family include systematic corruption on a staggering scale.

Members of the family have allegedly looted hundreds of millions of pounds from the Syrian people. That cash has been transformed by a fleet of overseas lawyers, tax experts and trust providers into a grand property empire: lavish apartments overlooking the Seine, a palatial Mayfair mansion, villas scattered across the Costa del Sol.

Today, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Guardian can unmask a Briton who helped manage those millions on behalf of Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of Bashar and a man known as the “butcher of Hama” for his alleged role overseeing the unlawful imprisonment, torture and execution of between 10,000 and 40,000 people in 1982.

In March, the financial regulator of Guernsey, a small Channel Island and dependency of the British crown, issued a £210,000 fine against Ginette Blondel, a 40-year-old Guernsey resident, and banned her from various positions of financial responsibility for nine years. It said she had repeatedly broken Guernsey law in her work for her clients, one of which was the Assad family.

The regulator anonymised Blondel’s client, but noted he was “an alleged war criminal” and “kleptocrat”. A regulatory notice states that Blondel knew of the serious allegations against her client and continued to work for him between 2013 and 2020, without a licence of regulatory oversight. But despite the large fine and lengthy ban, Blondel appears not to have faced criminal prosecution.

“Rifaat al-Assad’s crimes, particularly the 1982 Hama massacre, are among the gravest atrocities of our time,” said Philip Grant, executive director of TRIAL International, which first filed a criminal complaint against Assad in Switzerland. Grant called for stronger accountability measures, including criminal prosecutions and professional sanctions.

The ease with which a suspected war criminal funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly embezzled from Syrian public funds into Europe shines a stark light on the continent’s lax approach to money laundering in recent decades. It also highlights how the UK, its Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories have provided the services that enable some of the world’s most odious kleptocrats.

The revelations come as Guernsey awaits the results of a recent assessment by Moneyval, a Council of Europe body that probes money laundering and terrorist-financing controls in jurisdictions across the continent. The watchdog’s last report, in 2015, found that Guernsey’s prosecutions and convictions for money laundering were “disproportionately low” given the size of its financial system, which this year held almost £300bn in assets.

Empire of wealth

Few traces of Blondel’s past have been publicly visible since the regulator issued its penalty, with her online presence scrubbed from view. It noted that Blondel had earned a master’s degree in corporate governance and started work in Guernsey’s financial services sector in 2000.

It was at a regulated firm that she first encountered the family of Rifaat al-Assad, who according to the Guernsey regulator comprised “99%” of her work for the firm.

Rifaat was expelled from Syria in 1984 following an attempted coup against his brother, Hafez, the father of Bashar and then ruler of the country. Rifaat al-Assad spent most of the following decades in exile. He is not believed to have had a hand in the repression that took place during the civil war that began in 2012. But the immense wealth he amassed had been looted largely from Syrian public funds in the 1980s.

After fleeing to Europe, he went on to amass a property empire of astonishing proportions.

Authorities found that he and his family members acquired 507 properties with a combined value of almost €700m, cloaked behind shell companies, including in British territories like Gibraltar, and the British Virgin Islands.

The properties were owned by companies whose directors included Assad’s multiple wives and sons – but almost never the man himself.

The family purchased hundreds of properties, many in Spain’s Costa del Sol, including a €60m (£51m) villa in the town of Benahavís, a half-hour drive from Marbella.

In London, the Assads became the secret owners of the capital’s largest residence after Buckingham Palace – Witanhurst, a vast home in Highgate whose value has since been estimated at £300m. Cloaked behind a Panamanian shell company, Assad’s family members sold that pile in 2007, but acquired a Mayfair mansion whose current value could be up to £60m.

In Paris, the Assads acquired more than 40 apartments overlooking the Seine, and furnished a seven-floor mansion sitting on Avenue Foch – a grand boulevard leading to the Arc de Triomphe – with furniture worth more than £1m.

Probes and prosecutions

Assad has always claimed his wealth is legitimate – a gift from Saudi royals. But in a 2019 indictment Spanish prosecutors found the bulk of his wealth came from the $300m in Syrian state funds and loans paid to him by his brother Hafez in the 1980s.

Spanish prosecutors further accused him of having obtained “huge illicit resources from multiple criminal activities: extortion, threats, smuggling, plundering of archaeological wealth, usurpation of real estate, drug trafficking”.

That indictment was the result of one of the numerous criminal investigations into the Assads’ wealth that were launched across Europe during the seven years Blondel remained in the family’s employment.

In 2014, following a complaint by human rights NGO Sherpa, French prosecutors launched a money laundering probe against Assad that uncovered the scale of his property empire. In 2016, French authorities seized his assets. Spain and the UK followed suit, although British authorities were too late to prevent the sale of a £3.7m Surrey mansion occupied by one of his sons, according to the Times.

In June 2020, a French criminal court found Assad guilty of money laundering and embezzling Syrian public funds and sentenced him to four years in prison. Two challenges to the ruling failed, but Assad never saw the inside of a cell – he fled to Syria in 2021. (Blondel remained working with the family until March 2020, just three months prior to the conviction.)

Over a similar period, Swiss prosecutors had launched a probe into Assad’s alleged slaughter of tens of thousands of people in Hama, an incident that had been widely reported by the time Blondel began her unregulated work for him in 2013.

In formal interviews, Assad declined to speak but has always denied the allegations. In 2021, Swiss prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant against Assad, and this year formally charged him with war crimes.

In addition, Spanish prosecutors attempted to hold Assad to account. A 2019 indictment accused him of “systematically and industrially” committing crimes to enrich himself. It stated that Assad, despite using his wives and sons as proxies through which his property empire was held, retained “absolute control and dominion over the acquisitions”.

However, no prosecution appears to have followed.

Meanwhile, Blondel’s duties for the family went far beyond merely signing paperwork, according to the Guernsey regulator. On 23 October 2015, she received a €1m payment into her personal bank account, nominally to set up a trust company in Guernsey. But the company never materialised.

Blondel, however, did not return the cash. Instead, she used it to make more than 150 payments to various third parties.

The regulator said there was “a very real risk that Ms Blondel may have been used to launder the proceeds of crime, a risk which Ms Blondel has consistently failed to recognise”.

“Ms Blondel has consistently failed to understand the gravity and consequences of her actions.”

Dr Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said: “In the most egregious cases of money laundering … the full weight of the law must be used to create real deterrence.

“If countries like the UK and its crown dependencies … are only prepared to use regulatory measures such as fines and disqualification, they cannot hope to fully deter dirty money washing through their financial systems.”

Asked why Blondel had not been prosecuted, a spokesperson for the States of Guernsey told TBIJ the jurisdiction treated money laundering offences extremely seriously.

“In this specific case, the [regulator] took serious action against this individual, handing down a very large fine and a ban from working in the industry,” the spokesperson said.

“However, as people working in the law enforcement sector are well aware, the evidential threshold for a criminal prosecution and the threshold for a regulator to take action are very different.”

They continued: “As in all criminal matters, for any successful prosecution an alleged offence must be proven to the high criminal standard. Where, following a full investigation, there is insufficient evidence to proceed, a case will be closed.”

A spokesperson for the regulator, the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, told TBIJ it takes tackling financial crime seriously.

Ginette Blondel and Rifaat al-Assad did not respond to multiple requests for comment.