African Coup
On a steamy Sunday evening in March 2004, a chartered Boeing 727 touched down with a puff of blue smoke at the airport in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, Africa.
Capt. Neil Steyl taxied the jet to a section of the airport reserved for military aircraft. The plane was to be met there by Simon Mann, a British citizen and resident of Cape Town, South Africa, who had arranged the purchase of cargo that would be loaded into the 727’s hold. The flight plan called for the jet to then refuel and continue on to an undisclosed final destination.
It never got out of Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwean authorities stormed the plane and arrested the pilot, co-pilot and 64 men seated in the passenger cabin, where authorities also found $130,000 in cash. Simon Mann and two others on the ground were arrested, as well.
They were charged with attempting to buy weapons from the state-run Zimbabwe Defense Industries. Their arms requisition included 20 machine guns, 61 assault rifles, 150 hand grenades, ten rocket-propelled grenade launchers (and 100 RPG shells), and 75,000 rounds of ammunition.
Mann’s stammering explanation was that the plane was en route to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he and the men had been hired to guard diamond mines. The Zimbabwean officials didn’t buy it.
They alleged that the men — 23 Angolans, 20 South Africans, 18 Namibians, two Congolese and a Zimbabwean — were mercenary soldiers heading to tiny Equatorial Guinea, a malarial dot on the map on the west coast of the continent, where they intended to depose a corrupt president.
Two days later, 15 additional men with ties to Mann were arrested in the target country, charged as being the advance team for the coup. The scheme failed so spectacularly that it might be viewed as farce.
British news accounts reported that the plot had been an open secret — it was discussed at an energy conference in London a month before it occurred.
“Whatever Simon was doing, he was incredibly stupid to be flying a bunch of people to Zim and picking up weapons at the same time,” Greg Wales, a business associate of Mann, told the British press. “If you think you can do that without a problem, you are a bit naive.”
Imprudent as the plot may have been, it has developed into a conspiracy theorist’s dream, with tantalizing tentacles reaching to the upper echelons of British and American commerce and politics.
The scandal’s marquee name is Sir Mark Thatcher, son of Britain’s former prime minister, who faced serious charges in South Africa of helping to finance the plot.
But the abortive coup also attracted Klieg lights on a number of American corporations — many with links to the White House — that do billions of dollars of business with Equatorial Guinea and its president. Federal regulators, suspecting bribery and money laundering, are scrutinizing those relationships.
It all begs a couple of questions:
- Why would American firms like ExxonMobil and Riggs Bank risk their reputations playing financial footsy with the unscrupulous leader of a dusty African nation less populated than North Dakota?
- And why would mercenaries be hired to overthrow the despot of such a place?
The answer, in a word, is oil.
Equatorial Guinea, squeezed between Cameroon and Gabon at Africa’s west coast crook, has just 525,000 citizens in a nation about the size of Massachusetts.
Perpetually hot and humid, the country is composed of a small chunk of the African mainland and a collection of five islands. The capital, Malabo, is located on the island of Bioko.
The nation gained independence in 1968 after 200 years of Spanish rule. A democracy in theory but a corrupt dictatorship in practice, it has had just two presidents in its 37-year history.
Despite brutal regimes, Equatorial Guinea drew scant international attention through the early 1990s beyond the occasional finger-waggling human rights report.
That changed when a modest oil field was discovered in the nation’s territorial waters in the Gulf of Guinea. The field began producing 17,000 barrels of crude oil a day — not much compared to other countries, but enough to prompt further exploratory drilling.
In 1995, ExxonMobil hit the petroleum jackpot when it discovered a huge new field off Bioko Island. Today, the Gulf of Guinea’s oil reserves — owned by several countries — are estimated at more than one billion barrels, perhaps ten percent of the world’s total.
Equatorial Guinea’s oil fields produced 360,000 barrels a day in 2004, and oil accounted for 90 percent of the country’s exports.
Most of the world’s largest oil companies now trade with Equatorial Guinea, including Amerada Hess, ChevronTexaco, Devon Energy, Energy Africa, Marathon, Noble Affiliates and Petronas. Firms involved in oil exploration there include Chevron, ExxonMobil, Vanco, Atlas and Devon, all based in the United States; Roc, based in Australia; Petronas, based in Malaysia; South Africa’s Sasol; Britain’s Noble, and Glencore, based in Switzerland.
A vast natural gas field also was discovered. Equatorial Guinea signed a $1.4 billion deal with Houston-based Marathon Oil to construct a liquefied natural gas facility on Bioko. British Gas signed a 17-year agreement to buy product from the facility.
As a result of the energy finds, the nation has become the third largest recipient of direct investment from U.S. firms in sub-Saharan Africa. (The top two, South Africa and Nigeria, have exponentially greater populations — 43 million and 130 million, respectively — and land masses.)
The international investment has raised Equatorial Guinea’s per capita annual income from $370 in 1995 to nearly $10,000 today. Yet 70 percent of the population is malnourished, and eight in ten citizens have a subsistence lifestyle.
Nguema
Where is the oil money going? By all accounts, into the pocket of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, target of the ill-fated coup plot, and his relatives.
Obiang is the nephew of the nation’s first president, Francisco Macías Nguema, whose oppressive regime is estimated to have to have exterminated or exiled one-third of country’s population during his 11-year tenure.
He was killed in 1979 in a military coup led by Obiang, who was regarded early on as a legitimate reformer, lifting restrictions on religious expression, freeing political prisoners, restoring broken diplomatic ties and encouraging refugees to return home.
But President Obiang soon took his own stranglehold on power through violence, intimidation, patronage and election fraud. Human Rights Watch rates Equatorial Guinea among the world’s worst human rights violators.
As Frank Ruddy, U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea under President Reagan, put it, “It’s a corrupt, rotten government.”
In 1995, President Clinton closed the American embassy in the country.
In 2002, Obiang won reelection with 97.1 percent of the vote, down from 99.2 percent in 1996. After that 2002 election, state radio declared Obiang to be “in permanent contact with the Almighty.” An aide referred to the president as “like God in heaven.”
The aide went on, “He can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell because it is God himself with whom he is in permanent contact and who gives him this strength.”
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund long ago cut off its aid program to the needy nation, charging that Obiang hoarded the money for himself. He apparently did the same when oil money began pouring in during the mid-1990s.
“There is strong evidence that oil revenues have been misappropriated by the government,” concluded a 2004 report by the U.S. Department of Energy. “Furthermore, the government’s failure to direct oil revenues toward development — especially to fund urgently needed infrastructure improvements — has undermined economic and social progress in the country.”
Those who have investigated Obiang say he does not bother skimming from the top for his graft. He drags his ladle deep, emptying the pot.
For example, Equatorial Guinea was paid $130 million in oil royalties in 1998, according to the IMF. Yet Obiang’s administration claimed it was paid about one-quarter of that, $34 million. In more recent years, oil revenues have increased tenfold or more from the 1998 figures. Still, precious little trickles down to the nation’s impoverished citizens, who have an average life expectancy of 54.
Where do the missing millions go?
As much as $700 million has gone to a once-respected Washington, D.C., bank, some of it deposited directly by American oil companies into Obiang’s accounts, then transferred to secret offshore accounts.
European newspapers reported the president and his family frequently embark on frenzied no-limit shopping sprees at Faubourg Saint Honoré in Paris, home of some of the world’s most expensive couturiers and antique dealers.
The family also spends its money on U.S. real estate. President Obiang has two homes in suburban Washington, D.C., one valued at $2.5 million and the other at $1.3 million, according to the Washington Post. President Obiang’s son, Teodorin, who attended Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., maintains a $6.9 million mansion in Los Angeles.
Teodorin flits about Paris in a Rolls Royce or Lamborghini and once made an $11 million offer on a New York condo owned by Adnan Khashoggi but was rejected by the building’s board, according to the Nation magazine. An editor of an energy newsletter called Obiang’s son “the closest thing there is to an African oil sheik.”
It was Obiang’s son who indirectly prompted the coup attempt, according to accounts in the British press.
For more than three years, Obiang has been undergoing treatment for cancer, and some say his health is tenuous. Teodorin, his likely successor, is viewed as unstable. This might have led energy investors to worry that deals cut with President Obiang might not survive the regime change.
The Observer, a British newspaper, gave this account of the coup plot:
“The seed was planted in January 2003 in a series of meetings in London between Ely Calil, a Lebanese-born London oil dealer; and Simon Mann, a former British special forces officer who carved out a career as an African mercenary.
“Calil had cultivated a relationship with Severo Moto Nsa, a prominent opponent of President Obiang and president of the Guinean government-in-exile in Madrid.”
The Observer said Moto had agreed to replace Obiang after the coup. Calil’s motivation, according to news accounts, was a promise of sweetheart oil concessions with the new government.
In November 2003, Mann signed a $5 million contract with a group of Lebanese investors for “mining, fishing, aviation and commercial security projects in West Africa.” The Observer said the investors were acting as a front for Calil, and the coup was the true intent of the agreement.
Mann, in turn, signed a $2 million deal with Nick du Toit, 48, a former South African special forces commander with links to mercenaries and arms dealers, for “unspecified projects,” according to the Observer. Du Toit would later admit that he recruited the team of mercenaries, many of them former members of South African security forces from the apartheid era.
Du Toit is believed to have traveled to Equatorial Guinea in late 2003 and early 2004 to pay off military and government officials whom he believed would allow ready access to Obiang on the day of the coup.
Mann negotiated through intermediaries for the purchase of weapons from the Zimbabwe Defense Industries. The arms were to be delivered to Mann in February 2004 at a remote airstrip in the Congo. By one news account his leased jet broke down. By another, he arrived for the pickup, but the arms did not.
In any case, the arms delivery plan shifted to Zimbabwe two weeks later, but Mann was double-crossed and arrested, and du Toit and 14 others on the “advance team” were arrested in Equatorial Guinea.
Newspapers reported that Severo Moto, the exiled opposition leader, flew by turboprop helicopter from Spain to Mali on the eve of the coup. He was to have landed in the country 30 minutes after the mercenaries. The band planned to seize President Obiang from bed at 3 a.m. and spirit him away Spain — if he was not killed in the coup.
After the plot was foiled President Obiang went on television to accuse Moto, Calil, and British and American intelligence agencies of being behind the plan. Zimbabwean government sources quoted in the African press said British, U.S. and Spanish intelligence agencies were “involved,” although no further explanation was given.
Obiang complained that the United States had been tipped off about the coup attempt by South African authorities but had failed to warn him, despite his open business relationship with American energy barons.
Moto, like virtually everyone else implicated in the plot, denied all.
“I have absolutely nothing to do with this story,” Moto said. He said Obiang had linked him to the coup “to tarnish my political career.” He denied media reports that he had met with Spanish officials in advance of the coup to prepare for normalized relations with Equatorial Guinea’s old colonial ruler.
After his arrest, Mann gave a signed statement that read, “Ely Calil asked me if I would like to meet Severo Moto… At this stage they asked me if I could help escort Severo Moto home at a given moment while simultaneously there would an uprising of both military and civilians against Obiang… I agreed to try and help the cause.”
But it was in another document that Mann first raised Mark Thatcher’s name — or, more precisely, his nickname of “Scratcher” — in connection with the abortive coup.
Two weeks after his arrest, Mann attempted to smuggle a note out of Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi prison, where he was being held, to his wife in Cape Town. South African intelligence intercepted the note, scribbled on several scraps of paper.
It read:
“Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT. They (his lawyers) get no reply from Smelly and Scratcher. Asked them to ring back after the Grand Prix race was over! This is not going well!
“It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga (slang for a pile of money)! Of course investors did not think this would happen… Do they think they can be part of something like this with only upside potential — no hardship or risk of this going wrong. Anyone and everyone in this is in it — good times or bad. Now it’s bad times and everyone has to F-ing well pull their full weight.
“We need heavy influence of the sort that — Smelly, Scratcher… David Hart — and it needs to be used heavily and now. Once we get into a real trial scenario we are f****d.”
The note prompted South African authorities to launch an investigation of Mark Thatcher, a neighbor of Mann in Constantia, an exclusive suburb of Cape Town. Five months later, on August 25, Thatcher was roused from bed at 3 a.m. and arrested on charges that he helped fund the coup plot.
He apparently procured the turboprop helicopter used to ferry opposition leader Moto from Spain to Mali.
Thatcher was charged under a new South African law designed to inhibit meddling in African affairs by paid mercenaries — the so-called “dogs of war” who have helped roil politics on the continent for a century or more. South Africa’s Foreign Military Assistance Act bans residents of the country from participating in any foreign military action.
Thatcher admitted that he provided the helicopter but claimed it was a legitimate business transaction unrelated to the coup. A few days after the arrest, Thatcher’s American wife and two children, ages 11 and 15, were allowed to return to her hometown of Dallas.
He was freed on $300,000 bail, paid by his mother. While awaiting trial, he surrendered his passport and was required to check in each day with police officials.
He was banned from going near any airport because authorities allege he was preparing to flee South Africa for Dallas at the time of his arrest. He had sold four luxury SUVs, had listed his $3.3 million mansion for sale and literally had his bags packed when arrested, according to police.
Thatcher, at 51, has spent most of his life developing a reputation as Britain’s Billy Carter. Most of his countrymen long ago reckoned that Thatcher had more money than brains.
Like the brother of the former American president Jimmy Carter, Thatcher has been viewed as shiftless, rash, flighty, a bit goofy and perhaps corruptible — whether deserved or not.
He was born with twin sister Carol on August 15, 1953, to Denis Thatcher, a businessman, and his wife, Margaret, a chemist. Denis Thatcher held a series of executive positions in the oil, railroad and waste disposal industries as his wife’s star ascended in Britain’s Conservative Party, leading to her appointment as the nation’s education secretary in 1970.
Mark Thatcher was an uninspired student at the Harrow School, the exclusive boys’ boarding school near London, where he was known as a slacker who preferred a tennis racquet to a pencil. He never attended college. His mother steered him toward accounting, but he failed the qualifying exam three times before giving up.
Thatcher spent his young adulthood as a B-list playboy, pursuing the two great interests of so many wealthy scions: beautiful women and fast cars. The latter led to his coming-out scandal in 1982, three years after his mother was elected Prime Minister on a platform of tax-dollar stinginess. On little more than a whim, Thatcher, then 29, had entered the Paris-to-Dakar road rally, a grueling 7,000-mile race across the Sahara Desert. Ten days into the race his Peugeot turned up missing in the desert, and he landed on the front pages of the world’s newspapers for a week before a search party spotted his car. His father shepherded him home in the Algerian president’s jet.
The cost of the search was estimated at $500,000. Thatcher did not endear himself to the public when he showed no contrition for the humiliating escapade.
Thatcher moved to Texas during the middle of his mother’s 11-year tenure in office and started a consulting firm, Monteagle Marketing. He apparently worked, but no one could figure out for whom. As the Dallas Morning News put it in 1998, “The question that has always dogged Mark is: ‘What does the man do for a living?'”
It remains an unanswered question, although some say he makes money by trading on his mother’s name. Britain’s Guardian newspaper says Thatcher has made a career of “ruthlessly exploiting his famous surname and access to power… to set him on the road to riches.” The paper described him as a “fixer, wheeler-dealer, middle-man.”
His mother apparently agrees, in a fashion. She is widely credited with having said, “Mark could sell snow to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabs.” He has managed to find plenty of buyers for his snow and sand. Thatcher’s net worth was recently estimated at $100 million.
His biggest score came in 1985, when he reportedly pocketed an $18 million commission for helping to negotiate a $30 billion British arms sale to Saudi Arabia, according to the Times of London.
Two years later he married Diane Burgdorf, daughter of a Dallas auto dealer. During a decade in Texas, Thatcher became acquainted with George W. Bush before his fellow scion turned from oil and baseball to politics. In 1995, the Thatchers left Dallas and moved into a six-bedroom mansion near Cape Town, where they became acquainted with neighbor Simon Mann.
Mark Thatcher is viewed as the sort of person who could fall under the influence of a swashbuckler like Mann. Thatcher’s reputation in his homeland as a “mum’s boy” gnawed at him, especially because he fashioned himself an adventurer.
Most of his risk-taking has landed him in the newspapers, from the lost-in-the-desert debacle to intermittent allegations of impropriety — tax delinquency in Texas, a loan scheme in South Africa, another huge commission on a construction project in Oman.
In 2003, when Denis Thatcher died, Mark inherited his father’s “baronet” title, bestowed in 1991 in recognition of his wife’s service. While Sir Mark has had his flings, he had faced nothing as serious as his African troubles.
Whatever his culpability, Thatcher likely has Simon Mann to blame for involving him in the Guinean affair. Mann, 51, has been characterized as part businessman, part buccaneer. Married with several children, Mann owns homes in Hampshire, in the south of England, and near Thatcher in Constantia, South Africa.
Like Thatcher, Mann was born to privilege. His father was George Mann, who gained fame as an English cricket captain and went on to earn a fortune as an executive with the Watney’s Brewing empire.
Simon followed in his father’s footsteps to Eton, the exclusive English boarding school for boys whose illustrious graduates have included 18 British prime ministers, the occasional archbishop of Canterbury and more than a few royals, including Prince Charles’ sons, Harry and William.
As an “Old Etonian,” as graduates are known, Mann was welcomed into a club-like association of the world’s elite. The prep school background and privileged upbringing give Mann and Thatcher — and, some would say, President Bush — a common characteristic: hubris, the overweening self-confidence that they can do no wrong, even when they do.
Mann entered military service and made his way into the British Army’s Special Air Services, an elite force comparable to the Green Berets. He left the service as an officer in the 1980s. In 1993 he established the firm Executive Outcomes, which he described as a security company but others viewed as a mercenary enterprise.
His business associates included Nick du Toit, arrested on the ground in Equatorial Guinea, and Neil Steyl, pilot of the jet whose arrival in Zimbabwe touched off the coup’s unraveling. A decade ago, Executive Outcomes held lucrative contracts protecting oil wells in Angola against anti-government insurgents. It also was hired against insurgents by the Sierra Leone government.
But mercenary firms fell out of favor in Africa in recent years, and South Africa, where many of the soldiers of fortune had been based, outlawed military meddling. Mann folded Executive Outcomes and opened another security firm under a new name, Logo Logistics, based in the Virgin Islands.
David Hart, also named in Simon Mann’s prison note, is a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher with broad access to figures in the British and American governments. He has sometimes acted as a go-between in negotiations between governments and defense contractors. Hart, 60, lives in Suffolk, England, and is another Old Etonian.
Equatorial Guinea has issued an arrest warrant naming Hart as a player in the coup plot. President Obiang claims he has evidence that Hart helped finance the coup. The “Smelly” of Mann’s prison note is Ely Calil, 58, a naturalized British citizen who made millions trading Nigerian oil.
Obiang also named Calil as a conspirator, and the Guardian newspaper reported that Calil paid $750,000 toward the coup plot. Calil hired Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s former public relations man, to tout his innocence. Calil said through Bell that he was the victim of “an elaborate set-up.”
It was not Calil’s first brush with international intrigue scented with oil. French police arrested Calil in 2002 in connection with oil-related bribes paid to Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. He has not been charged, although French authorities say the investigation remains open.
Another possible player in the coup financing was Greg Wales, a London businessman whose alleged involvement is perhaps the most titillating for those trying to divine American political links to the scheme.
Simon Mann referred to Wales by his initials “GW” in the prison note. His role, if any, in the coup plot is not clear. The Guinean government has alleged that Mann paid Wales $8,000 but could not explain why.
Wales admitted to the media that he often did business with Mann, although he denied involvement in the Guinea plot, which he called “stupid.” But according to Newsweek magazine and the Guardian, Wales met twice in Washington in late 2003 with Theresa Whelan, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs. Wales reportedly briefed her on the impending trouble in Equatorial Guinea. Whelan acknowledged the conversation but downplayed its importance.
Wales was in Washington to attend a conference of the International Peace Operations Association, a Washington-based group that describes itself as “an association of private sector service companies engaged in international peace operations around the world.”
The group says its members “are involved in all sectors of peace and stability operations including mine clearance, logistics, security, training, and emergency humanitarian services.”
Participants have said the subject of Equatorial Guinea came up both formally and informally during the 2003 conference, at which secretary Whelan spoke.
The coup drew international attention to Equatorial Guinea, President Obiang and the missing millions from the nation’s oil windfall. American authorities were obliged to look into the country’s myriad financial relationships with domestic corporations.
It wasn’t difficult to smoke out the rat: For the past two years, journalist Ken Silverstein has been producing detailed reports that all but spelled out the bribery and corruption, first in the Nation magazine and later in the Los Angeles Times.
He reported, for example, that U.S. oil companies had made deposits at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., in an account established by President Obiang. Federal investigators discovered that Guinean officials sometimes made walk-in cash deposits at Riggs branches of as much as $1 million in shrink-wrapped bills.
Riggs, the oldest bank in Washington, calls itself, appropriately enough, “the bank of presidents.”
The Treasury and Justice departments, as well as a U.S. Senate investigative subcommittee, had scrutinized Riggs’ “embassy banking division” for years concerning allegations of money laundering on behalf of foreign leaders, including former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The new federal investigation revealed that Equatorial Guinea was Riggs Bank’s biggest customer, with more than 60 accounts and deposits of as much as $700 million.
The bank had allowed the Guineans to transfer money freely between accounts, some personal and some designated for official government business. Worse, Riggs had enabled wire transfers of more than $35 million from Equatorial Guinean accounts to the secret accounts of offshore corporations.
And they did it all happily. The bank’s executives were more than happy to do business with the Guinean government, Obiang and his family.
“Where is this money coming from?” a Riggs executive vice president emailed to colleagues in 2001. “Oil — black gold — Texas tea!”
The bank was assessed a $25 million penalty for its “willful and systematic” enabling of money laundering. Simon Kareri, the senior manager who oversaw the Equatorial Guinea business, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify during a Senate investigative subcommittee hearing in 2004.
The Senate report released in July confirmed much of the reporting by Silverstein of the L.A. Times, saying the bank’s actions prompted “concerns related to corruption and profiteering.” It also suggested that federal regulators investigate the oil companies invested in the country.
The report concluded, “Oil companies operating in Equatorial Guinea may have contributed to corrupt practices in that country by making substantial payments to, or entering into business ventures with, individual Equatorial Guinea officials, their family members, or entities they control, with minimal public disclosure of their actions.”
Weeks after the Senate report was made public, the Security and Exchange Commission’s Fort Worth office notified four of America’s largest oil companies that they were the subject of a preliminary investigation in connection with violation of securities laws prohibiting bribes to foreign government officials.
The firms are Amerada Hess, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and Marathon, all with roots in Texas. The SEC has plenty of deals to pore over.
For example, oil firms have paid $4 million to fund the education aboard of about 100 Equatorial Guinean students, most of them relatives of Obiang and his closest advisors. Another potential source of bribery was the $1 million in leases the oil firms paid for property and buildings owned by relatives of President Obiang, according to federal investigators. An ExxonMobil official told Senate investigators last summer that this was business as usual in such banana republics.
“It may be virtually impossible to do business in such countries without doing business with a government official or a close relative of a government official,” said Andrew Swiger, an Exxon executive vice president.
The petroleum trail has led some to insinuate White House connections to the Equatorial Guinea affair, because “oil” and “Texas” are linked inextricably to another word: Bush.
To be sure, Bush has myriad oil connections to Equatorial Guinea, including friendships or business relationships with numerous executives whose firms are invested there. Two examples:
- In 2001, Amerada Hess paid $3.2 billion to buy Triton Energy. The transaction made two wealthy executives of Triton, Tom Hicks and Bob Holland, even wealthier. Both are close friends of President Bush and members of his $100,000-donor “Pioneers.” In 1998, then-Gov. Bush earned $15 million on a $606,000 investment when Hicks bought the Texas Rangers from its ownership group. Triton’s lucrative deals in Equatorial Guinea were a primary factor in the lofty purchase price paid by Amerada Hess.
- Halliburton, the petroleum and energy service-provider once led by Vice President Cheney, has had business relations with many of the oil firms active in West Africa. It is a major subcontractor for Vanco, a Houston firm that is the largest holder of underwater energy exploration licenses in sub-Saharan Africa. A Halliburton subsidiary has been accused of paying a $180 million bribe to the former government of Nigeria in connection with natural gas reserves there.
After his first election, President Bush felt intense lobbying from the oil industry to reopen the American embassy in Equatorial Guinea, closed by President Clinton in 1995, weeks before the vast oil fields were discovered.
According to reporter Silverstein, a memo to Bush from the industry read, “It is important to underscore that most of the oil and gas concessions awarded in Equatorial Guinea to date have been awarded to U.S. firms. This is in stark contrast to neighboring countries in the region, where the United States has consistently lost out to French and other European and Asian competitors.”
In November 2001, Bush authorized the reopening of the embassy — a vote of confidence for President Obiang. There still is no embassy, although the ambassador posted in neighboring Cameroon is considered the U.S. representative to Equatorial Guinea and has met with Obiang.
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has promoted West Africa as an attractive alternative to the Middle East as a source of oil and gas for America. Equatorial Guinea is a key component of that strategy, in spite of all its flaws.
The State Department’s 2004 report on the country says, “Poor fiscal management and a lack of transparency in public accounting of national finances have undermined the country’s economic potential. Oil companies have paved roads in Malabo, upgraded the island’s electricity generating system, and funded a variety of health and environment projects designed to improve citizens’ well being; however, there was little evidence that the Government used the country’s oil wealth for the public good.”
The report said the nation’s human rights record remained poor, citing “numerous abuses, including torture, beating, and other physical abuse of prisoners and suspects, which at times resulted in deaths.” It managed one positive note: In 2003, there were fewer reported incidents of torture and abuse than in previous years.
The investigations of Riggs Bank and the American oil companies are continuing, but African courts have disposed of charges against all but one of the men charged in the coup. Last November a court in Equatorial Guinea convicted all but three of the men arrested there. They were given stiff sentences but avoided the death penalty, which was an option.
Nick du Toit, the South African mercenary who helped Simon Mann recruit the dogs of war, was sentenced to 34 years in jail.
At trial, prosecutors introduced into evidence du Toit’s earlier statement that Simon Mann recruited him and he in turn recruited mercenaries. The statement said the intent of the coup was to install Severo Moto as president. However, du Toit repudiated the confession during the trial, saying he was coerced by interrogators who threatened to kill him.
Four other South Africans got 17-year jail sentences, and six Armenians were sent to jail for terms ranging from 14 to 24 years. Three additional South Africans were acquitted.
Severo Moto, the exiled opposition leader, was sentenced in absentia to 63 years in prison, and eight Guinean Moto supporters living abroad were given 52 years each. Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, a judge in September sentenced Simon Mann to seven years, the stiffest penalty of nearly 70 men arrested at the Harare airport. However, an appeals court in Zimbabwe later reduced Mann’s sentence to four years.
The two pilots of the jet got 16 months each, and the 64 mercenaries on board were handed 12-month sentences for immigration offenses.
Mark Thatcher was the last figure charged in the coup to face legal proceedings.
He was under intense pressure from his family and British authorities to accept a plea agreement to a lesser charge that would eliminate the possibility of imprisonment. However, Thatcher had stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he knew anything about the coup, insisting he was an arms dealer who agreed to provide a Russian-built Mil helicopter, to be used as an air ambulance in Equatorial Guinea.
In a statement released by his lawyers he said, “I am innocent of all charges made against me. I have been and am cooperating fully with the authorities in order to resolve the matter. I have no involvement in an alleged coup in Equatorial Guinea and I reject all suggestions to the contrary.”
Yet prosecutors say they have solid evidence implicating Thatcher in the plot.
“We allege he is one of the financiers of the coup to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and we have received credible evidence that he has assisted financially in that regard,” said Sipho Ngwema, a spokesman for the elite Scorpions investigative unit of the South African police. “Anyone who is using this country as a springboard for violence and disorder, we are going to deal with those persons quite strongly.”
In January 2005, Thatcher finally admitted to South African authorities that he knew the helicopter was to be used by mercenaries in the Equatorial Guinea coup.
Convicted of violating South Africa’s mercenary ban, he was fined $500,000 and given a four-year suspended prison sentence.
Outside court, Thatcher told reporters, “There is no price too high for me to pay to be reunited with my family, and I am sure all of you who are husbands and fathers would agree with that.”
Finally free to leave the country after five months, Thatcher did so in a hurry.
He is said to have spent a week in Europe before joining his family in Texas.
Thatcher had hoped to reunite quickly with his wife and two children in Dallas, but the United States government denied him the resident visa that would have allowed him to live in the country.
The Bush administration apparently gave him no special treatment; it mulled his application for more than two months before rejecting it on the grounds of his criminal background. And it went so far as to advise Thatcher against traveling here on a tourist visa — apparently with an unspoken threat of arrest.
“It is quite true that my visa application has been rejected,” Thatcher said in a statement to the press in London, where he has been living with his mother. “It was always a calculated risk when I plea bargained in South Africa. As a result of this decision, I shall make the family home in Europe, not the UK, and my family will be joining me as soon as arrangements are made.”
The reunion apparently didn’t go so well. Nine months after he was freed, the Thatchers announced they were divorcing.
“Mark Thatcher urged to accept a plea bargain,” by Jane Flanagan, the Telegraph, Dec. 26, 2004.
“Oil Firms’ Rich Concessions to Tainted African Ruler Probed,” by Ken Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, Dec 18, 2004.
“Pentagon link to Guinea coup plot: Bush official was warned of trouble brewing in oil-rich state,” by David Leigh, David Pallister and Jamie Wilson, the Guardian, Sept. 27, 2004.
“US Oil Firms Entwined in Equatorial Guinea Deals,” by Justin Blum, Washington Post, Sept. 9, 2004.
“The Iron Lady and the Teflon son: Mark Thatcher’s famous mother again bails him out of a jam as his Dallas-area neighbors voice disbelief over coup allegation,” by Michael Granberry, Dallas Morning News, Sept. 2, 2004.
“Nicked in time: arrest came as Thatcher set to flee, say police,” by David Blair, the Telegraph, Aug. 28, 2004.
“Mercenaries, money and political connections,” by Jamie Wilson and David Pallister, the Guardian, Aug. 26, 2004.
“Hopes Abandoned in Harare,” by Jamie Wilson, David Pallister and Paul Lashmar, the Guardian Aug. 26, 2004.
“Thatcher ‘planned to leave home,’ BBC.com, Aug. 26, 2004.
“Sir Mark Thatcher: Playboy-turned-businessman dogged by rumours of financial impropriety,” by Matthew Tempest, the Guardian, Aug. 25, 2004.
“SEC eyes oil payments to Equatorial Guinea,” by the Associated Press, USA Today, Aug. 6, 2004.
“Riggs Investigation Prompts Inquiry into 3 Oil Firms,” by Kathleen Day, Washington Post, Aug. 5, 2004.
“Corrupt influence by Big Oil alleged; Senate panel uncovers deals in West Africa,” by David Ivanovich, Houston Chronicle, July 16, 2004.
“U.S. Investigates Oil Firms’ Deals in West Africa,” by Ken Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2004.
“The Politics of Petroleum: Gusher to a Few, Trickle to Many,” by Ken Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2004.
“Ties Between Bank and African Oil State Probed,” by Ken Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2004.
“Guns for hire thrive in Africa; More than 60 men in Zimbabwe have been accused of planning a coup in Equatorial Guinea,” by Abraham McLaughlin, Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2004.
“Did Africa coup begin in Chelsea?” by A. Barnett and Patrick Smith, the Observer, March 14, 2004.
“Oil Boom Enriches African Ruler,” by Ken Silverstein, the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 20, 2003.
“U.S. Oil Politics in the ‘Kuwait of Africa,” by Ken Silverstein, The Nation, April 4, 2002.
“Gushers of wealth, but little trickles down,” by David Hecht, Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 1999.
“What a Day to Remember: Dallas family never dreamed there’d be so much attention,” by Lorraine Adams, Dallas Morning News, Nov. 14, 1986.