In the spring of 2001, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, at age 33, bought a
$6.5 million house in the fashionable Los Angeles enclave of Bel Air.
About the same time, Nguema, the son of Equatorial Guinea dictator Teodoro
Nguema Obiang Mbasogo, twice went to a Beverly Hills dealership and purchased
two Bentley automobiles.
That was the beginning of a $10 million fleet of U.S. purchases that
included eight Ferraris, seven Rolls-Royces, four Mercedes-Benzes, two
Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin and a Maserati, the Justice Department
said.
In 2005, he added two high-performance racing boats to his fleet for
$2 million. In 2006, he bought a $38 million Gulfstream G-V jet and
traded his Bel Air mansion for a luxurious villa
overlooking the ocean in Malibu for $30 million. Last year, he decorated the mansion with fedoras, jewel-encrusted apparel
and music-industry awards acquired during auctions of the belongings of the pop
star Michael Jackson.
Nguema, the minister of forestry and agriculture of Equatorial Guinea, a
poor African nation, made all of these purchases on an annual government salary
of about $81,000.
U.S. government lawyers said his wealth was “inconsistent with his salary”
and the purchases were the result of plundering the nation’s natural gas and
oil reserves.
His spokesman, Greg Lagana of Qorvis Communications in Washington, said Nguema and Equatorial Guinea’s government “are deeply
concerned” about the U.S. action. Nguema’s purchases, Lagana added, involved
“no wrongdoing.”
The case has some anti-kleptocracy campaigners asking: If Nguema’s spree
was so ostentatious and obviously based upon “extortion, misappropriation,
embezzlement, or theft of public funds,” as the government alleges, then why did it take so long to file the case?
And what does it mean in the search for the assets of other dictators?
“This is positive, but is it going to take five years to recover any of the
other dictators’ assets?” asked Robert Palmer, a campaigner for Global Witness,
which lobbied for action against the Obiangs.
Justice Department officials are quick to note that Attorney General Eric
H. Holder Jr. created the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative just this year,
assigning about five full-time attorneys to manage cases.
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