Operation Oil Theft: Month 6, Week 2, Day 3.

Subtitle; Doh!

Overnight (31/8/11 - 1/9/11) Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) delivered 280 million Libyan Dinar of banknotes to Libya. This is the first tranche of banknotes with a face value of 1.9bn Libyan Dinar to be delivered and Britain is celebrating the delivery as an Eid gift from Britain to the Libyan people.

The problem is that no actual wealth has been transferred to Libya. Back in 2010 the Libyan government ordered these banknotes from Britain's Royal Mint to replace old and damaged banknotes already in circulation in the Libyan economy. Then when the war started Britain simply refused to deliver these banknotes to the Libyan government. Now Britain has begun shipping these new notes to the rebel's Transitional National Council (TNC) without any plans to remove the old notes they were meant to replace from circulation.

So what Britain's actually done is devalue the Libyan Dinar making the Libyan people about US$1.5bn poorer. This is actually quite similar to Nazi Germany's plan to destroy the British economy during the second world war by flooding it with counterfeit banknotes. The TNC are actually thanking Britain for this so Transitional National Council is the correct term because they are the council managing Libya's transition from a nation to a failed state.