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Rumor has it that Jean Claude Duvalier will be able to recuperate his millions after all at the Swiss Bank due to a loophole in the Swiss law.

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the playboy who succeeded his father, the great voodoo priest "Papa Doc" Duvalier as ruler of Haiti in 1971, will soon be a millionaire again. Haiti may be the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but in his 15 years in power, Baby Doc and his glamorous wife, Michele Bennet, stole an estimated $500 million from the Haitian treasury, mainly through the president's "non-fiscal account" at the Regie du Tabac. That's the Haitian government's Tobacco Administration, roughly equivalent to the PTDF or the NNPC in some other places. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Haiti and declared that "something must change here". Not long afterwards, a series of revolts began in Haitian cities, and in January 1986, the Duvaliers fled to the airport in Port-au-Prince and on to France.

By all accounts, the Duvaliers lived an expensive life in France; when the French authorities once invaded their quarters in Mougins and seized a notebook that Mrs Duvalier tried to flush down a toilet, it showed some of her expenses from a recent shopping trip. They included $168,000 for clothes at Givenchy, $270,000 for jewellery at Boucheron, $9,752 for two children's horse saddles at Hermes, $68,500 for a wall clock, and $13,000 spent for a week's stay at a Paris hotel.

Anyway, the Duvaliers divorced in 1993, and Michele made away with most of the remaining money, leaving Baby Doc very broke. Some years later, the former dictator and his mother, claiming to be "a couple", checked into a $78-a-night hotel in Paris and could not pay a dime after many weeks' stay. They were apprehended and taken to a police station, where a girlfriend came and settled the bill. It is a warning to some of our departing men, that even $500 million could one day finish.

Maybe Baby Doc went broke because he took only $500 million from Haiti. Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, who ruled The Philippines for 21 years from 1965, stole an estimated $5 billion, but his departure from Manila was no tidier that Baby Doc's. Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda did many unsavoury things while in power, but their slow downfall began in 1983, when prominent opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino was gunned down at Manila Airport soon after he arrived home from many years' exile.