The sheer scale of the crime is staggering, almost unbelievable: an estimated $20 billion stolen from the Libyan people in just three years. To put that number into perspective, that colossal sum, lost to state-sanctioned fuel trafficking between 2022 and 2024, is enough national wealth to more than triple Libya’s combined spending on both healthcare and education.
By keeping these barters off the public balance sheets, the NOC was suddenly unencumbered by financial constraints, and fuel imports exploded.
This monumental betrayal, detailed in The Sentry’s explosive investigative report, “Inside Job: Libya’s Fuel Smuggling Escalation,” reveals that Libya is not being robbed by external forces. It is being systematically pillaged from within by the very political and security leaders who claim to serve the public. These untouchable thieves, the chief architects of a multibillion-dollar smuggling industry, have transformed a national subsidy program into a weapon of kleptocracy.
The Sentry, an organization that tracks grand corruption to disable the multinational predatory networks benefiting from violent conflict, exposes a fundamental truth about Libya’s chaos: the political rivalry is a profitable façade. While the networks linked to the Haftar family in the east and figures aligned with the Dabaiba family in the west posture as bitter opponents, they are, in fact, the principal beneficiaries of a coordinated criminal pact. Their conflict is merely a distraction, allowing them to carve up the nation’s wealth and entrench a corrupt status quo that rewards the elite and starves the population.
This industrial-scale theft hinged on a deliberate policy shift in 2021 by the National Oil Corporation (NOC), the entity whose hydrocarbon exports account for virtually all of Libya’s income. The NOC swapped its previous procurement methods for an opaque crude-for-fuel swap mechanism. By keeping these barters off the public balance sheets, the NOC was suddenly unencumbered by financial constraints, and fuel imports exploded. They surged from roughly 20 million liters per day in early 2021 to a peak of over 41 million liters per day by late 2024. This doubling of imports was not driven by genuine domestic need, but by a lucrative arbitrage opportunity.
The refined fuel, intended for domestic consumption at heavily subsidized, near-zero prices, was instead siphoned off—more than half of all procurements—and resold abroad at vast Mediterranean market prices for astronomical profits. This mechanism structurally destabilized the nation, costing the state approximately $6.7 billion in 2024 alone. By maximizing fuel imports, the state reduced the amount of crude it could sell for crucial foreign currency, creating the hard currency deficit reported by the Central Bank of Libya and fueling the dinar’s depreciation and consumer inflation.
The culpability extends just as deeply into northwestern Libya, where armed groups linked to Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dabaiba play a central role.
The execution of this industrial-scale theft required military protection and logistical genius. In the east, Saddam Haftar, the ambitious son of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, consolidated control over both maritime smuggling operations and crucial overland routes stretching deep into sub-Saharan Africa. He used his position within the Libyan Arab Armed Forces to reshape the sector, blurring the lines between legitimate and illicit activities.
The culpability extends just as deeply into northwestern Libya, where armed groups linked to Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dabaiba play a central role. Warlords like Zawiyah’s Mohammed Koshlaf and Misrata’s Omar Bughdada, a figure tightly aligned with the Prime Minister, move enormous volumes of fuel. In Misrata, for example, a fuel depot is connected to the sea by an underground pipeline, serving as a hub from which fuel is moved by trucks into sub-Saharan markets like Chad and Niger. These years of gigantic illicit profits have enabled these powerful figures, based in Tripoli and Benghazi alike, to expand their influence across key formal institutions, including the NOC itself.
The implications of this state-level crime transcend Libya’s borders, turning the country into a logistics hub for global instability. The Sentry’s investigation establishes direct ties between Libyan kleptocracy and global conflict. The stolen subsidized fuel is diverted to foreign military networks, actively benefiting Russian military units operating in Libya and Mali. Most acutely, this financial contamination benefits the genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan. Libya, through its elite’s greed, is effectively using its national wealth to underwrite the operations of actors committing atrocities and prolonging Sudan’s horrific civil war.
While the elite consolidate their power, ordinary Libyans are paying the human cost. The siphoning off of over half the fuel causes severe domestic shortages and risks of general blackouts. In peripheral areas, the citizens the subsidy was meant to serve are forced to pay extortionate rates, sometimes up to forty times the official price for essential gasoline and diesel at unofficial outlets.
The political elite profit twice: first by stealing the subsidy, and second by forcing the population to purchase the resulting scarcity at hyper-inflated black market rates.
The devastation is not just economic. The lack of fuel required to run essential generators has led to tragic, fatal consequences, contributing to the death of patients and newborn babies in hospitals during outages. The political elite profit twice: first by stealing the subsidy, and second by forcing the population to purchase the resulting scarcity at hyper-inflated black market rates.
The evidence is overwhelming and the cost is too high to ignore. Immediate and decisive international action is mandated. International partners must insist on robust, structural economic reform to disable the criminal business model entirely. The Government of National Unity must phase out the lucrative fuel subsidy program and replace it with a direct cash stipend disbursed to households. This shift would instantly remove the financial incentive for arbitrage, deflating the value of the illicit network. Simultaneously, there must be decisive international sanctions and a Western-backed investigation to ensure the politicians and oil officials responsible for orchestrating the $20 billion heist are identified and held accountable.
Without robust international intervention, these networks will continue to use their vast, ill-gotten wealth to entrench themselves further, ensuring that the suffering of the Libyan people remains nothing more than capital for their corrupt empire.
Published originally on November 16, 2025.
