The Wall Street Journal reports that top-ranking Afghan officials spent millions of dollars on luxurious mansions in the United States and abroad to escape violence and strife in Afghanistan after the war. This discovery demonstrates the rampant corruption of Afghan officials, including former president Ashraf Ghani, as they looted government funds to finance their residences and exorbitant lifestyles abroad. While Ghani now resides in a suite at the five-star St. Regis Hotel in Abu Dhabi, many of his former officials purchased expensive homes in the United States.
For instance, Eklil Hakimi, Ghani’s former finance minister, bought at least ten properties in California, including a $2.5 million dollar five-bedroom house in the Laguna Niguel area near the beach. He made some of these purchases while finance minister, and some after leaving the post in 2018. The properties are estimated to be valued at over $10 million. He is not alone. Several former officials for the previous Ghani administration, such as the vice president, former foreign minister, and, ironically, the minister of economy, are living abroad and enjoying the funds they plundered from Afghanistan. This is the same government that has been accused of enabling the Taliban as government officials abandoned the country with millions of dollars. The graft is unabashedly egregious and shameless.
Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to Afghanistan. Several high-ranking officials in Egypt, Bahrain, and other Arab nations have fled to the United States with money from their home nations despite being responsible for flagrant human-rights violations. In Lebanon, corrupt officials have faced massive protests as they seek to spend their money in the United States during an unprecedented economic crisis in their country of origin. Corrupt officials who pilfer state resources or work for governments that abuse human rights frequently go unpunished.
The solution to this widespread problem is the Global Magnitsky Act. The Magnitsky Act was a law passed in 2012 in honor of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who exposed a $230 million dollar corruption scheme within the Russian government and was subsequently tortured and murdered. The Magnitsky Act required the president to block property purchases and travel from Russian officials deemed culpable of gross human-rights violations against Sergei Magnitsky. This law was later expanded as the Global Magnitsky Act, which authorized the president to sanction flagrantly corrupt individuals, especially those who abused state assets and resources for personal gain, as well as human-rights abusers anywhere in the world. It also would allow the president to withdraw the visas and freeze the assets of many of these high-ranking corrupt officials who find refuge in expensive U.S. mansions.
To cull corruption and promote better governance in the Middle East, America needs to better implement the Global Magnitsky Act to punish corrupt officials accused of corruption and human-rights abuses.