Growing up in Africa, he used to hunt buffalo, a passion that still serves Geneva-based lawyer Enrico Monfrini well.
His dogged pursuit of ill-gotten assets has made him the scourge of many of the world’s dictators and kleptocrats.
An affable man with a sharp wit and a ready smile, the 67-year-old blends easily into a city of sprucely-dressed asset managers, bankers and lawyers, though his chosen calling would likely surprise many of them.
Working from an austere legal practice in central Geneva which belies its global reach, Dr Monfrini has made his mark as a bounty hunter. In light of the Arab Spring, the available bounty may just have got a whole lot bigger.
Dr Monfrini is already working on finding the assets of Tunisia’s former ruler Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali: “We’re on a good track for finding some of the money.”
Since the start of the Arab Spring, Switzerland, the United States, Britain and others, have frozen several billion dollars belonging to regional strongmen and former leaders. Like Irving Picard, the lawyer seeking fraudster Bernard Madoff’s hidden assets, Dr Monfrini is officially appointed to track down assets seized by former dictators like Haiti’s Babydoc Duvalier and their cronies.
While Dr Monfrini is watching developments in Libya, Syria and elsewhere, his firm Monfrini Crettol Partners refrains from working for governments whose legitimacy is in doubt and where corruption may still be widespread.
“It’s impossible to do a proper job when mandated by people who could also have a hand in the till,” he said.
Dr Monfrini’s first assignment pursuing dictator assets began in 1999 after a late night meeting in Geneva with a Nigerian government security advisor, who persuaded him to help track down the loot of the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and his officials.
To date, Dr Monfrini said he had managed to locate some $2 billion (€1.6 billion) of Mr Abacha’s assets, of which $1.3 billion (€998 million) had so far been returned to Nigeria.
But identifying dictator assets is only part of what Dr Monfrini does.
Much more time consuming and frustrating is the effort to get international cooperation to seize assets and return them to the populations from which they have been stolen.
“The UK took five or six years to grant assistance on Abacha. They kept coming back to us with useless information, and France never gave us one document,” said Dr Monfrini.
Dr Monfrini said Liechtenstein banks hold €176 million that Mr Abacha salted away in three different accounts despite a final court ruling to return the money to Nigeria in March that followed a 12-year struggle.
“They don’t really know how to enforce (the ruling) and they are not in a rush to do so,” said Dr Monfrini.