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One way to understand Libya under dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, a former SNC-Lavalin executive’s fraud trial heard Wednesday, is to think of the country as being ‘like the Mafia’: unofficial rules governed the economy and everyone knew who not to cross.

“I think it’s actually a very good description of what Libya was,” said Diederik Vandewalle, a Dartmouth College professor and expert on modern Libya, during former executive Sami Bebawi’s fraud and corruption trial.

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“There were no real institutional rules, no checks and balances,” Vandewalle said, and it was very well understood “that if you transgressed what Gadhafi wanted, some dire consequences would follow.”

Vandewalle explained how, at the time SNC-Lavalin was expanding its business in the country, Gadhafi and his children decided which economic projects moved forward and intermediaries often extracted bribes from foreign companies seeking contracts.