A wary world weighs Libya’s rich prospects

* username: rupertbu

There was a particularly telling moment at an international business conference held in Tripoli last week.

The organiser, an executive of a western company, welcomed participants and told them it had been the most challenging forum he had ever staged. It was, he said, even more difficult than a Beirut conference he had been involved in that was to be attended by a Lebanese prime minister, only to be blighted by a bomb scare.

There are no bomb scares in Libya, the oil and gas-rich North African state ruled by Colonel Muammer Gaddafi for 40 years under his tight grip and a peculiar system of Islamic socialism. Indeed, security is one of the country’s stronger points. But it is not hard to understand the problems of the conference organiser.