Tunisian banks funded businesses linked to the families of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi to the tune of €1.3 billion, the country’s central bank chief said yesterday.

Mustapha Kamel Nabli said this was the equivalent of five per cent of all financing by the Tunisian banking sector, and nearly 30 per cent of the cash was provided with no guarantees of repayment.

The banks funded a total of 182 businesses owned by members of the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families and others connected with them, Mr Nabli said at a press conference.

“We can recover 71 per cent of this financing, there were guarantees, but 430 million dinars are risky loans, there is no guarantee of recovering them,” he said. While Mr Nabli did not identify the banks by name, he said they included both public and private sector ones.

More than half of the €1.3 billion (Tunisian dinar equivalent of $1.75 billion) were used to bankroll the launch of four companies including mobile telephone firms Tunisiana and Orange, whose main shareholders are Ben Ali’s son-in-laws Sakher el-Materi and Marwan Mabrouk, he said.

Ben Ali and his wife, along with their inner circle, are suspected of having pocketed much of the country’s wealth over the years and of taking personal stakes in much of the economy.

The European Union has frozen the assets of the former first couple and 46 of their associates. Switzerland has also slapped an asset freeze on the Ben Ali entourage.

Since the president’s ouster on January 14, output of many companies has slowed and the country’s key tourism sector is struggling following the mass exodus of vacationers during the unrest, Mr Nabli said.

“We have fears about the economy spiralling downward in the coming months if the social tensions continue and exporting companies lose their foreign markets,” he added.

High unemployment and economic hardship were among the factors fuelling the protests in Tunisia which morphed into massive demonstrations chasing Ben Ali from power.