World’s richest forestry minister lives large in US
Photo | El Mundo Despite officially earning only $5,000 per month as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue lives like royalty in the United States. He also owns luxury properties in his home country, including this beachfront estate in the town of Bata.
The owner of the estate at 3620 Sweetwater Mesa Road, which sits high above Malibu, California, calls himself a prince, and he certainly lives like one.
A long, tree-lined driveway runs from the estate’s main gate past a motor court with fountains and down to a 15,000-square-foot mansion with eight bathrooms and an equal number of fireplaces.
The grounds overlook the Pacific Ocean, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, four-hole golf course, and Hollywood stars Mel Gibson, Britney Spears and Kelsey Grammer for neighbours.
With his short, stocky build, slicked-back hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, the prince hardly presents an image of royal elegance. But his wardrobe was picked from the racks of Versace, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, and he spared no expense on himself, from the $30 million in cash he paid for the estate to what Senate investigators later reported were vast sums for household furnishings: $59,850 for rugs, $58,000 for a home theatre, even $1,734.17 for a pair of wine glasses.
When he arrived back home — usually in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce or one of his other several dozen cars — his employees were instructed to stand in a receiving line to greet the prince.
The prince though, was a phony, a descendant of rulers but not of royals. His full name is Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue — Teodorin to friends — and he is the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a country on the west coast of Africa about the size of Maryland or two and a half times the size of Kenya’s Central Province.
A postage stamp of a country with a population of a mere 650,000, Equatorial Guinea would be of little international consequence if it did not have one thing: oil, and plenty of it.
It is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest producer of oil after Nigeria and Angola, pumping around 346,000 barrels per day, and is a major supplier and reliable supporter of the US.
Over the past 15 years, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp and other US firms have collectively invested several billion dollars in Equatorial Guinea, which exports more of its crude to the US than any other country.
Energy revenues have flowed into the pockets of the country’s elite, but virtually none have trickled down to the poor majority; since the oil boom began, the country has rocketed to one of the world’s highest per capita incomes — and one of its lowest standards of living.
Nearly four-fifths of its people live in abject poverty; 15 per cent of Equatorial Guinea’s children die before reaching 5, making it one of the deadliest places on the planet to be young.
Teodorin’s 68-year-old father, Brigadier General Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, seized power in a 1979 coup and has made apparent his intention to hand over power to a chosen successor.
Obiang has sired an unknown number of children with multiple women, but 41-year-old Teodorin is his clear favourite and is being groomed to take over, a scary prospect for the long-suffering citizens of his country and for US foreign policy. As a former US intelligence official familiar with Teodorin said: “He’s an unstable, reckless idiot.”
He is also, according to thousands of pages of documents from multiple Federal and congressional investigations of the Obiangs over the last decade, fantastically corrupt.
As the minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Teodorin holds sway over the country’s second-largest industry. Investigators have documented how he has run his ministry like a business, operating several logging companies alongside the agency meant to regulate them.
Documents from a secret joint investigation by the US Justice Department and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency quote sources alleging that Teodorin supplemented his modest ministerial salary of $5,000 per month with a “large ‘revolutionary tax’ on timber” that he ordered international logging firms to pay “in cash or through checks” to a forestry company he owned.
Investigators suspect a large chunk of his assets was derived from “extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct,” stated a 2007 Justice report detailing the probe.
Teodorin has not only amassed a vast fortune, he has routed much of it into the US; a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last year found that he used shell companies to evade money-laundering laws and funnel more than $100 million into the United States.
All those millions purchased Teodorin a lavish and debauched lifestyle, according to allegations in a series of previously unreported lawsuits against him by a dozen former employees at the Malibu estate.
They claim they were cheated out of salaries, overtime wages, and work-related expenses for items ranging from gasoline to toilet paper, while being forced to support a tawdry setup straight out of the movie The Hangover: There were drug “binges,” as one ICE document claimed, escort service girls, Playboy bunnies and even a tiger.
“I never witnessed him perform anything that looked like work,” reads a legal filing on behalf of Dragan Deletic, one of Teodorin’s former drivers. “His days consisted of sleeping, shopping and partying.”
After years of wrangling, most of the cases have been settled and the employees signed agreements preventing them from speaking about Teodorin.
But prior to that, the writer interviewed several plaintiffs and their attorney, Jim McDermott, and read the case filings. He also reviewed thousands of pages of US and foreign investigations that involve Teodorin. They are incredibly damning.
The larger issue raised by all this is why the US — after going to the effort to produce this mound of information pointing to Teodorin’s flagrant corruption and apparent misuse of the banking system — has been unwilling to do anything about it.
“I’m surprised he’s still allowed in the country based on all the information contained in the Senate report and uncovered by other investigators and reporters,” said Linda Candler, a former Justice Department prosecutor.
Indeed, legal experts say Teodorin should not have been allowed to enter the US since 2004, when President George W. Bush issued Proclamation 7750, which bars corrupt foreign officials from receiving US visas.
“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” said Bush’s successor Barack Obama, whose administration pledged to “vigorously” enforce 7750. “We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don’t.”
And yet no formal action has been taken, despite an investigation whose goal, according to one of the Justice Department documents, was to shut down the flow of money into the US “obtained through kleptocracy” by the Obiangs.
Why? US officials declined to discuss the ongoing cases on the record or speak harshly about Equatorial Guinea; it certainly appears to be the familiar story of a government unwilling to offend an important oil partner — the same coddling that has produced such stellar results in the past with Saudi Arabia and other energy-rich, democracy-poor Middle East allies.
The Obama administration last year did help block Unesco, the UN cultural agency, from accepting $3 million from Obiang to endow a science prize in his name — but only after a public outcry sparked by media reports.
Otherwise the administration has said little publicly about Equatorial Guinea’s awful record of corruption and human rights violations, and it has failed to impose sanctions on Teodorin or the state he is set to inherit.
As of late 2010, years after the Justice Department probe began, investigators were still seeking to identify expert witnesses who could tell them about the early days of the Obiang regime.
To date, the only substantial actions taken against the Obiang clan in the US have been prompted by the efforts of McDermott, the plaintiffs’ attorney, and Superior Court judges in California.
“In our system of international politics, there’s a lot of ass-kissing, especially if there’s oil involved,” McDermott said “But in the cases that have gone to judgment, the buck has stopped with our state court, which doesn’t give special treatment to anyone, including Teodorin. That’s the beauty of the rule of law.”
But in Equatorial Guinea, the Obiangs are the law. The only former Spanish colony in sub-Saharan Africa, Equatorial Guinea gained independence in 1968.
The country’s first ruler was Francisco Macias Nguema, a crackpot dictator who named himself the “Implacable Apostle of Freedom” and “The Sole Miracle of Equatorial Guinea.”
In 1979, by which time his regime had murdered 50,000 of his opponents — real and imagined — the Sole Miracle was overthrown and executed by his nephew, Obiang père. Obiang was then only 37 but already skilled in the art of dictatorship after running Macias’s National Guard and Black Beach prison, a notorious torture chamber for political prisoners.
Over the past three decades, Obiang has been thrice “elected” in sham ballots, most recently in 2009 when he won 95.4 per cent of the vote (a record low; he peaked with 97.85 per cent in 1996).
The US historically had little interest in Equatorial Guinea and closed its embassy there in 1995 after the regime issued threats against Ambassador John Bennett, who had protested over human rights conditions. But in an unfortunate twist, American companies soon discovered vast reserves of oil and gas in the waters off Equatorial Guinea and successive US governments have been slowly but steadily backtracking ever since.
The key step came in 2003, when after intense lobbying by the oil industry, Bush approved the reopening of the US Embassy in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea’s capital. (The embassy formally reopened three years later.)
“With the increased US investment presence, relations between the US and Equatorial Guinea have been characterised as positive and constructive,” notes the State Department’s country profile. Relations may be good, but the official US assessment of the country is much less rosy.
The State Department’s most recent global human rights report cited abuses in Equatorial Guinea including “torture of detainees and prisoners by security forces; life-threatening conditions in prisons (and) arbitrary arrest.” Freedom House’s 2011 “Freedom in the World” survey put the country in its “worst of the worst” category along with North Korea, Sudan and Turkmenistan.
Equatorial Guinea’s economy depends almost entirely on oil, which last year generated over $4 billion, giving it a per capita annual income of $37,900, on par with Belgium.
“The oil has been for us like the manna that the Jews ate in the desert,” Obiang has said. It certainly has been for him. Obiang placed eighth on a 2006 list by Forbes of the world’s richest leaders, with a personal fortune estimated at $600 million. His population has not fared so well. Human Rights Watch reports that one in three of Obiang’s impoverished subjects dies before 40.
Obiang’s corruption is hardly unique among oil-rich dictators. French authorities have uncovered 39 properties in France and 70 bank accounts held by the family of President Omar Bongo, who ruled Gabon for 41 years until his death in 2009. (Soon thereafter, his son, Ali Bongo, took power.) Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the leader of Congo-Brazzaville, has bought a variety of French properties with tens of millions of dollars in oil revenues siphoned out of his country.
“All the leaders of the world have castles and palaces in France, whether they are from the Gulf, Europe, or Africa,” Sassou-Nguesso recently said by way of explanation.
A few members of Congress have criticised Obiang — Michigan Sen Carl Levin once compared him to Saddam Hussein — and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has twice investigated the regime in its report on Teodorin last year and in 2004 when it found that Obiang personally controlled as much as $700 million in state funds deposited at Riggs Bank in Washington D.C. by US oil firms.
The Senate panel said Riggs opened multiple accounts for Obiang and helped the president stash his wealth in offshore shell corporations; it was eventually hit with a huge fine for this and similar dealings with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
But in general, the US has looked the other way since the oil boom, aside from criticism contained in the pro forma annual State Department human rights reports and milquetoast appeals for better behaviour.
“We’ve raised our strong concerns about the country’s poor human rights record consistently in meetings with officials at the highest level,” a State Department official said.
Early one evening this past summer, this writer met two of Teodorin’s PR handlers from Qorvis, Matt J. Lauer and Seth Pietras in Washington. Allegations of human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea are exaggerated, they said, citing their experience during a trip to the country.
“We could walk around at night and talk to people and no one interfered with us,” said Lauer. “No one is saying there are no problems, but it’s not North Korea.” Pietras noted that Bush had reportedly been a drinker and partier as a younger man before becoming more serious. Teodorin, he offered, “is at the point where he’s thinking about his legacy.”
If so, then some serious soul-searching is in order. In the fall of 1991 Teodorin, then 22, arrived on the posh Malibu campus of Pepperdine University to enroll in an English-as-a-second-language course. Walter International, a Houston-based energy firm that then had a stake in Equatorial Guinea’s as-yet-untapped offshore fields, financed his studies.
Walter also agreed to pick up Teodorin’s living expenses, which proved to be a costly mistake. Tuition was a mere $3,400 and included boarding at Pepperdine, but Teodorin deemed the dormitory unsuitable and shuttled between two off-campus residences: a rental home in Malibu and a suite at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. He rarely attended class, instead spending his time shopping in Beverly Hills.
He dropped out of the programme after five months; Walter’s tab came to about $50,000.
Teodorin travelled the world in subsequent years but frequently returned to Los Angeles. In 2001, he bought a $6.5 million home on Antelo Road in Bel Air, across from actress Farrah Fawcett. He never moved in, lamenting to a real estate agent that in retrospect the house was too contemporary for his taste.
Teodorin dreamt of being a hip-hop mogul and for a time owned and operated a label whose name was derived from his initials: TNO Entertainment. Its most significant project appears to have been a flop titled No Better Than This by Won-G, a fitting collaboration given that the rapper, whose real name is Wondge Bruny, has described his father as a former military official under “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the Haitian dictator deposed in 1986.
Teodorin continued to burn through cash during these years. He lived for a time at a Paris hotel off the Champs-Élysées; a French TV crew captured him on a shopping spree during which, it reported, he bought more than 30 suits in a single day. In 2004, he bought two estates worth $7 million in Cape Town. But he and his family generally stayed off the radar screen in the US — until the Riggs scandal broke.
Lesser kleptocrats might have turned tail and fled, but not Teodorin. He employed two lawyers to set up shell companies and bank accounts that he controlled but on which his name never appeared.
In 2006, Teodorin used one of the firms, Sweetwater Malibu LLC, to purchase the Malibu estate, which is among the largest homes in the private gated community of Serra Retreat.
Teodorin wasn’t to be outdone by his Hollywood-star neighbours. He owned at least three dozen luxury cars, including seven Ferraris, five Bentleys, four Rolls-Royces, two Lamborghinis, two Mercedes-Benzes, two Porsches, two Maybachs and an Aston Martin, with a collective insured value of around $10 million, says the Senate investigation.
These were far too many cars to keep at the estate, so Teodorin rented storage space in the garage of the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard and had his drivers fetch the one he wanted for an outing, a choice that sometimes depended on his attire. “I’m wearing blue shoes, so get me the blue Rolls today,” he once told Benito Giacalone, a former driver.
His favourite was a blue Bugatti Veyron, a car that can reach speeds of more than 250 miles per hour and sells new for about $2 million. One night, Teodorin parked his toy near the entrance of L’Ermitage, a favourite hangout. When he saw gawkers stop to admire it, he sent Giacalone back to Malibu by cab to bring his second Bugatti and park next to it.
He dated a series of women, among them rapper Eve, whom he designated as president, treasurer and chief financial officer of his Sweet Pink shell company, according to the 2010 Senate report.
In 2005, Teodorin reportedly threw a party for Eve aboard the Tatoosh, a 303-foot yacht that he rented for $700,000 from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
An account in the New York Daily News said she later cooled on him, perhaps after hearing that his father was an accused cannibal who had eaten his political rivals.
Thanks to his diplomatic passport, Teodorin routinely carried as much as $1 million in cash into the country, the ICE documents allege. Several ex-employees said he had a bag the size of a small suitcase that was forever stuffed with stacks of fresh $100 bills.
America has been one long party for Teodorin, but his days of wine and roses might be coming to an end. He still owns the Malibu estate; Lauer at Qorvis insists there is no information suggesting he is barred from the US and that he came on a visit last spring.
But the 2010 Senate report disclosed reams of the family’s sensitive banking information, which has surely reduced his ability to move money into the country. Meanwhile, new lawsuits keep sprouting up — there are four still outstanding — and the charges grow even more lurid, with one former employee alleging full frontal nudity by Teodorin.
“He is a guest in our country who clearly does not think the rules apply to him,” McDermott argues.
Perhaps all this helps explain why Teodorin is seldom in Los Angeles these days, spending far more time in Equatorial Guinea. It may not be Malibu, but he owns a huge beachfront estate there with a swimming pool set on a patio dotted with marble statues imported from Italy.
After years of allowing him to run amok in the US, the American government may soon find that it needs to deal far more directly with Teodorin in the future.
In a clear sign of his political ascendancy, his doting father named him vice president of the ruling party last July. Furthermore, a well-placed source said officials in Equatorial Guinea have already informed American oil company executives that Teodorin will be the country’s next leader.
If the Obama administration thinks he was hard to manage as the Prince of Malibu, just wait until Teodorin becomes the King of Equatorial Guinea.
Reproduced with permission from Foreign Policy #185 (March/April 2011) www.foreignpolicy.com ©The Washington Post
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