| 1 | BERN, Switzerland (AP) " A Swiss official says his country has made headway toward returning some $40 million that was stolen from the Tunisian state and has been sitting in Swiss banks since Tunisia's longtime regime collapsed in the Arab Spring uprising. |
| 2 | Valentin Zellweger, a legal adviser to the Swiss government, said Monday the federal prosecutor and highest court still have to take steps in the restitution case, but that the process has come a long way. |
| 3 | Zellweger declined to specify who had deposited the money in Switzerland, but said it wasn't former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled Tunisia during the 2011 uprising. |
| 4 | "In the Tunisian case, we are pretty well advanced," he told reporters in Bern. |
| 5 | Switzerland is preparing legislation on the restitution of funds stolen by powerful people and kept in Swiss banks " once notorious as favored monetary hideaways among dictators. |
| 6 | Zellweger estimated that thousands of such "politically exposed persons" currently have accounts of that kind in Switzerland. |
| 7 | He and other Swiss officials say their country is at the forefront of such restitution efforts around the world, having returned some $1.8 billion in so-called "potentate funds" in the last three decades " including money once in the hands of former dictators like Nigeria's Sani Abacha and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. |
| 8 | In March, Swiss authorities announced their country would hand over more than $120 million to Brazil that was frozen as part of corruption probes involving Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras. |