Syrian campaigners and human rights lawyers are pressing British authorities to disclose and potentially repurpose tens of millions of pounds reportedly linked to former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and believed to be held in a London bank account, according to UK’s The Observer.
The newspaper reported that campaigners believe Assad may have left at least £40 million in an HSBC account before returning from London to Syria in 1994. With accumulated interest, some estimates have placed the account’s possible value at approximately £55 million.
Neither HSBC nor the British Treasury has confirmed that the account exists. HSBC told The Observer that it does not comment on customer relationships and remains committed to complying with sanctions. The Treasury declined to discuss the specific case and said the use of frozen assets to compensate victims was not currently under consideration in Britain.
Eyad Hamid, a member of the London-based Syrian Legal Development Programme, has spent years tracing assets associated with Assad and his network. He and other campaigners want sanctioned Syrian funds to be placed in a compensation mechanism for victims of torture, enforced disappearance and other crimes committed under the former regime.
The campaign gained momentum after lawyers examining frozen Syrian assets uncovered British court documents referring to private investigations that had identified an HSBC account allegedly connected to Assad. The documents emerged from litigation concerning compensation for the 1985 hijacking of EgyptAir Flight 648, which a United States court later found had received support from the Syrian state.
A group of airline insurers awarded $51.5 million in damages subsequently searched for Syrian assets abroad. British High Court documents said investigators had reason to believe that the Syrian head of state held an HSBC account containing more than the value of the judgment. HSBC, however, said it had found no account in Assad’s name, raising the possibility that any funds were held under another name.
The High Court ruled that the Treasury had the authority to provide information about the assets, but left the decision on disclosure to the government. The case has since remained unresolved.
Campaigners argue that Britain lags behind the United States and the European Union, where legal mechanisms have allowed some frozen or confiscated assets to be redirected towards victims or reconstruction. British law currently permits authorities to freeze sanctioned assets, but generally provides no mechanism for their seizure and redistribution.
According to the Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, Britain holds £383.5 million in frozen Syrian assets. The government has not disclosed who owns the assets or where they are held.
Human rights organisation Redress has criticised the lack of transparency and called for sanctioned assets linked to torture and corruption to be used to compensate victims. Campaigners had hoped the collapse of Assad’s government in December 2024 would prompt a change in British policy.
Syria’s new authorities are also seeking the recovery of frozen state funds abroad to support reconstruction after years of war. Central bank governor Abdelkader Husrieh has said that reclaiming sanctioned assets in Europe and the United States remains necessary, even if the amounts recovered are limited.
Hamid maintains that part of Assad’s fortune remains in London and argues that, if the account was formally sanctioned, the British Treasury should possess a record of it.
“If this is true, then the money must be there. You cannot just move it somewhere else,” he told The Observer.
