Word: za
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...Chicago, the son of an attorney, and graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa. He went on to get a master's degree and Ph.D. from Georgetown University under the tutelage of then Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick. His Ph.D. thesis was based on a three-year stint in Zaïre, where his wife was a public health specialist for the Agency for International Development. In 1976 and '77 Adelman worked as a special assistant to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his political mentor. Adelman served on Reagan's transition team, then returned to his post as a strategic...
...nation's expense." Kickbacks are the order of the day, with the President's cronies controlling significant slices of the economy. "It's the greed of a handful at the top that keeps this country in an economic mess," says one Belgian businessman. Complains one of Zaïre's former financial advisers: "We had great hopes, but they are all gone. It is a country that makes people dream and then makes them go crazy...
Businessmen are not the only people to despair. In 1978, the International Monetary Fund sent Erwin Blumenthal, formerly a top official of West Germany's Bundesbank, to take over as the director of Zaïre's central bank. TIME has obtained a copy of the secret report he wrote to IMF Managing Director Jacques de Larosiere early last year. In it, Blumenthal describes refusing high officials' requests for bundles of cash of up to $50,000, finding a government payment of $4 million to a Belgian professor who was the guardian of Mobutu...
Blumenthal left Zaïre in 1979. But he continued his investigations in Western Europe, obtaining from former Zaïrian Prime Minister Nguza Karl-I-Bond, now living in exile, the estimate that Mobutu's private fortune exceeds $4 billion. Most of it was said to be held in Swiss bank accounts, a point that may explain why the Swiss have been receiving fairly regular payments on loans owed them by Za...
...only factor that has kept Western bankers from calling a default is that large loans would have to be written off. "If Zaïre were serious about sorting out its debt, it could be done in a matter of years," says one creditor. Explains a Western diplomat: "The Zaïrians are not worried about being a basket case. The elite always do well regardless of who is putting up the money...