Aug 22, 2018 The Rise and Fall of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s Longtime Dictator. Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was a former Catholic school teacher who led the Zimbabwe African National Union, one of. African Dictators. Africa has several long-standing dictators; however, they are beginning to lose power across the continent. In the last four years.
Judging by the fleet of supercars parked in the grounds of Geneva’s Bonmont Golf and Country Club last Sunday, Teodorin Obiang was not overly fussed by the size of his carbon footprint.There were 25 in total, representatives of every luxury model conceivable, from Aston Martin to Bugatti and Ferrari, just a portion of the automobile collection amassed by the president of Equatorial Guinea’s pampered son.Their sale represented “a highlight of the international motoring calendar,” enthused James Knight of Bonhams, the presiding auction house.It was an understatement. By the end of the day, the collection had gone for nearly £22m.
Mr Obiang’s Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, sold for £6.8m, would go down in the record books as the most expensive Lamborghini ever auctioned.Not a penny, however, will go to Mr Obiang. The entire collection had been seized by Swiss authorities investigating him on suspicion of looting his country’s treasury and laundering the proceeds. Switzerland has not been alone in investigating Mr Obiang. In 2014, US authorities forced him to surrender £24m in assets, including a mansion in Malibu and one of Michael Jackson’s crystal-covered gloves, which he had bought for £223,000, after a senate investigation concluded he had smuggled £90m of suspect money into the country.France, too, has got in on the act. After he was convicted in absentia on money-laundering charges, French authorities seized his 100-room house in Paris and yet more cars.Mr Obiang, who denies all allegations against him, is not the only target. The families of four more present and past African heads of state are under investigation in France. Bokassa even claimed to have given Mr Giscard gifts of diamonds in gratitude.It was not just politicians.
Last year, Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) oversaw the return of £405m prosecutors in Angola say was purloined from the country’s central bank by, among others, its former governor.Investigations have begun to turn up startling details revealing the extent of some African politicians’ wealth. French prosecutors found that that Gabon’s ruling Bongo family owned 39 properties in and around Paris.Such excesses may be eye-catching, but the scale of the plunder in Africa often runs much deeper. One case in Nigeria has served more than any to highlight both the scale of the theft and a renewed determination in the West to fight it.The name Deepwater OPL245 was not designed to get the layman’s pulse racing. For those in the know, however, it is the Eldorado of Africa, a 617-square mile stretch of territory that contains within it a potential half-a-trillion pound fortune.The size of the bounty contained within its confines is staggering: an estimated 9bn barrels of recoverable oil as well as significant quantities of natural gas buried under the sea off Nigeria’s coastline.For a country with the highest rates of extreme poverty in the world, it should have been a huge windfall. Nigeria may be Africa’s biggest oil producer, but this single field carried within it a quarter of the country’s reserves, making it arguably the single biggest energy prize on the continent. Instead, according to prosecutors in Nigeria and Italy, the block was essentially stolen, the proceeds of the theft divvied up among a cabal of powerful politicians who attempted to stash their ill-gotten gains abroad.It began in 1998, when the country’s then oil minister, Dan Etete, allegedly awarded the rights to OPL245 to himself, via a shell company called Malabu Oil & Gas that had been created just five days earlier.The scandal would eventually go all the way to the top.
Court papers filed in London in May by Nigerian government lawyers accuse Goodluck Jonathan, the country’s president from 2010 to 2015, of using his office to enable a second theft of OPL245 in exchange for a share of the loot. Mr Jonathan has not commented on the allegations. The OPL245 affair united Western states as never before in their determination to expose the scandals. Investigations followed in the United States and Switzerland.
Bank accounts were frozen in Britain and the Crown Prosecution Service returned £59m seized from them to Nigeria.Most significantly, a criminal trial is now underway in Milan (with a second likely to follow in the Netherlands) against Eni, the Italian energy giant, and its even bigger Anglo-Dutch counterpart, Royal Dutch Shell. The two firms secured the rights to OPL245 in 2011. Prosecutors accuse the companies of being aware that the vast majority of the £1.1bn they paid would end up not in the Nigerian treasury but in accounts run by Mr Etete’s shell company and senior politicians.
Yet researchers believe nearly £540bn has been stolen from Nigeria since independence from Britain in 1960, enough to fund the English NHS for nearly five years.And often it is only the careless who have been caught. Mr Obiang came to the attention of campaigners because he posted photographs of his cars and yachts on Instagram under the hashtag #luxuryliving.He also boasted of how he would give girlfriends a daily shopping allowance of $80,000 in 100-dollar bills, enraging many in a country that, at independence from Spain in 1986, had more hospital beds per capita than its colonial master but where most now live in squalor. American officials at the Department of Justice were able to uncover a scandal related to another Nigerian oil minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, after her associates splashed out on an £65m yacht which they reportedly hired out to pop stars, including Beyonce and Jay-Z, for parties.The yacht was seized by US officials and sold in July. Nigeria, meanwhile, says it is trying to extradite Mrs Madueke, who lives in London, from Britain to stand trial. British officials declined to comment on the extradition request.Other African politicians are thought to be more cautious.
They stay several steps ahead of investigators by creating shell companies, most notably in secretive British offshore territories like the British Virgin Islands, and moving the money from jurisdiction to jurisdiction with such speed that investigators struggle to keep up. Britain is spearheading an effort to counter the problem by creating an agency, the International Anti-Corruption Co-ordination Centre, to allow law enforcement agencies across the rich world to cooperate in cross-border investigations.Its efforts are starting to bear fruit, leading to the arrest of five senior African officials in four African states since the centre was launched in July 2017, Rupert Broad, its head, told the Daily Telegraph. Mr Broad did not name the officials involved.Steps have been taken to end the secrecy that surrounds shell companies. Britain and other EU states have forced financial institutions to publish registers to reveal the identities of those who really own companies.But offshore tax havens are dragging their feet, while a number of US states have resisted efforts for greater transparency.Even in Britain, campaigners worry it is far too easy to open a shadowy company with few questions asked. It remains possible to register a firm online in Britain in just three hours at a cost of only £20.It is a sign, says Steve Goodrich, leading UK researcher at Transparency International, a watchdog, that although progress has been made, Britain and others still have a long way to go. James Ibori, former governor of a Nigerian state, was convicted in Britain in 2012 after admitting to plundering more than £200m from the public purse and stashing much of it in the UK.Yet, nine years after he was first arrested and more than two years since he completed his prison sentence, Ibori’s lawyers have been able to frustrate efforts to confiscate most of the £80m frozen in his British bank accounts.And even Mr Obiang, for all his setbacks, may manage to have the last laugh.
His lawyers have succeeded in getting an order from the UN court to prevent France selling his Parisian mansion by arguing that the property belongs to the Equato-Guinean embassy and is therefore diplomatically protected.Meanwhile, having managed to fly his Gulfstream jet out of the United States under the nose of American officials, he also succeeded last week in getting the Swiss to return his yacht, the £100m, 250-foot Ebony Shine, after arguing it belonged to his country’s navy.