Then there's this!

By Robert Windrem
NBC News investigative producer for special projects

If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is forced into exile, he is likely to have access to billions in assets. But if Egypt’s successor government tries to recover any of it, it will have a hard time, if history is any judge.

Estimates circulated inside the U.S. government, developed by various agencies, put Mubarak’s wealth at between $2 billion and $3 billion. How much of that total is outside of Egypt, and in what form, is uncertain. How much is recoverable is an even smaller fraction.

AP reported that some in Egypt believed Mubarak controlled $70 billion in assets, but U.S. officials dismissed that number as wildly exaggerated. They noted that Bill Gates, the richest man on the Forbes 400 list, is worth $53 billion.

Nick Peck, Head of Complex Investigations of Nardello & Co., worked in a similar position with Kroll Associates when that company was hired by Kuwait to track Saddam Hussein’s wealth. He’s also familiar as well with Kroll’s attempts to track, and recover, the wealth looted from the Philippines by the Marcos family.

“The initial numbers are often very overblown,” says Peck. “Often suspect in terms of how much the official has.”

Officials say historically most of the assets controlled by dictators remains within their home countries. Peck pointed to a stash of millions of dollars in cash and gold bars found hidden underground in Iraq following the war.

“Always concerned about their own security, they like to keep an amount liquid in their own country,” says Peck. “But if he’s planning long term, for a future outside the country, a dictator will think, ‘Let me stuff some in Swiss bank or a Panamanian nominee account.’”

Indeed, finding the hard currency or the gold bars at home is nowhere near as difficult as tracking paper and real assets overseas. Peck points out that the Marcos family invested heavily in midtown Manhattan real estate, while Saddam held tens of millions of dollars in public stock in European companies. The Shah of Iran used a family foundation to acquire a Fifth Avenue office building.

Proving ownership, says Peck, is difficult.

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s likely a duck, but that often doesn’t meet the legal threshold to seize that asset,” he notes. “It’s a tough battle to prove it. There are nominee accounts," accounts in another person's name, "but no bank savings book. What you’ll almost never find is a deposed leader’s name linked to accounts.”

Peck says he also heard reports while investigating Saddam that certain events would trigger asset transfers from financial institutions in western locales to more obscure institutions.

There are other common denominators, says Peck. Often times, a trusted family member and/or confidante is located overseas near the assets. Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, controlled Saddam’s overseas assets from an office in Geneva. (Barzan, like his half-brother, was hanged by the Iraqi government for crimes against humanity unrelated to his investments.)

“What people have to understand is there are no shortcuts," Peck said. "It's time consuming and requires some degree of luck in getting the right sources to successfully identify the stolen assets."

In another country in transition, Tunisia's provisional cabinet on Thursday adopted a battery of "practical mechanisms" to enable it to recover assets of figures of the ousted regime, the country’s official news agency said.

Once recovered, "the smuggled and plundered funds and assets" will be used for the development of mainly poorer areas in the country, it said.