Even if successful, the civil forfeiture proceedings unveiled by the justice department may not recover all the ill-gotten assets listed.  The government notes that the Gulfstream jet flew from Basel Mulhouse airport in France to Equatorial Guinea on October 11. And in 2009 some 26 automobiles and assorted motorcycles with a total value of $12m were shipped from the U.S. via France, mostly en route to Equatorial Guinea. These included seven Ferraris, four Mercedes-Benzes,  five Bentleys, four Rolls Royces, two Bugattis and one Aston Martin (some of these vehicles may be among over a dozen luxury cars seized earlier this month by police in Paris as part of a separate French corruption investigation). 

The U.S. proceedings do not themselves aim to hold Teodorin criminally liable for his depredations.  The cases could nonetheless lead to later criminal proceedings. At a minimum, they underline the message that the United States will not automatically provide a safe haven for corrupt foreign leaders to park the wealth they steal from their own people.  

This case joins the criminal proceedings in Spain and France, investigating alleged proceeds of corruption held by Teodorin and his close family. But the U.S. legal filings paint the clearest picture so far of the kinds of day-to-day business methods used by the ruling clique in Equatorial Guinea, dubbed "the inner circle" of President Teodoro Obiang. They range from inflated bid rigging to extortion, embezzlement and theft, including the misappropriation of funds, land and other assets. The filings allege that:

• Teodorin’s brief (five-month) college career at Pepperdine University in Malibu was paid for by one of the oil companies operating in EG, including both a house he rented in Malibu and stays at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
• In 1993, Teodorin’s father granted his 24-year-old college drop-out son a 20-year 61,000-acre timber concession; shortly after, Teodorin received an additional 27,000 acres, for five years.  Then in 1998, the President made his son Minister of Forestry.  Teodorin took in huge profits from his concessions through his personal holding companies, Sofona and Somagui  Forestal , though the actual logging was done by a Malaysian company.  
• Using his position as Minister of Forestry, the filings allege, Teodorin  charged a personal fee for companies seeking to obtain timber concessions, and then imposed on timber exporters an unlawful “tax” payable to his own account, with timber exports prohibited until the “tax” was paid.
• The filings describe direct transfers from government bank accounts under control of the President or his family, including $35 million transferred from the Riggs Bank Equatorial Guinea oil account to two companies apparently connected to President Obiang. One of them, a Panamanian shell company called Kalunga S.A., is subject of a money-laundering proceeding filed in Spain by the Spanish Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España (APDHE).  (The Justice Initiative is collaborating with APDHE on this case).
• The filings set out how, when negotiating to purchase a $40 million luxury aircraft for his personal use in 2005, Teodorin tried to arrange with the seller for the purchase price to be paid by one of the U.S.  oil companies, which would then be able to credit those payments against oil royalties payable to the EG government  – a neat way to  steal  $40 million from the government before it even received the funds.  While the oil company balked in this case and the scheme did not go forward, the incident illustrates the way in which the Obiang clan allegedly uses EG’s national wealth as a private piggy bank.
• The filings describe how the Inner Circle benefits from its de facto control over the public procurement process to  submit “inflated bids” for projects  awarded without true competition,” generating “mark-ups from 50 percent to 400 percent or more,” generating lush cash flows for the “Inner Circle.”  In 2003 and 2004, Teodorin’s company Somagui Forestal received two multi-million dollar government contracts for road construction.

The significance of this case is enhanced by the fact that it breaks with the more common pattern of waiting until a family’s rule has ended before tracking down their assets:  for years, Qaddafi, Mubarak, Marcos, Abacha, and other dictators were coddled by Western countries, which were only too happy to buy their country’s oil and other resources, and carry on business as usual with them until their regimes toppled. 

In contrast, Teodorin’s family is still very much in control in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, most of whose oil and gas is pumped by US companies. His father Teodoro is trying to improve the country's international image. Those efforts include hosting the African Union summit this summer, staging the African Nations soccer cup next year, and the so-far unsuccessful bid to persuade UNESCO, the UN's main cultural and educational body, to institute an Obiang science prize funded by the family.

The president and his wife are also well on the way to carrying out what opposition critics believe is a plan to install Teodorin as successor, following a supposed constitutional “reform” referendum that is expected to create a new post of vice president. This would then allow Teodorin to waltz into the presidency without need for even a fraudulent election.

But Obiang is not giving up. U.S. consultants hired last year continue to issue glowing news releases, highlighting a charity dinner held in its capital Malabo; the president’s infrastructure plans; or the country’s  preparedness for  hosting the 2012 African Nations soccer championships.  The official line, with a link to an Equatorial Guinea embassy’s Flickr photo page, is always that “Equatorial Guinea is now working to serve as a pillar of stability and security in its region of West Central Africa.”

Now there are signs that Equatorial Guinea is also laying the groundwork for a new bid to persuade a new slate of UNESCO board members that its president is indeed a man worth honoring.

The campaign so far has included taking advantage of the country’s current position holding the presidency of the African Union.  Obiang secured a courtesy resolution of support from African Union heads of state when they met in Equatorial Guinea in July: the resolution urged UNESCO to implement its earlier decision to set up the prize, which would “contribute to research in the life sciences.”

Then on August 17, the six central African states (Angola, Cameroon, Congo Brazzaville, DRC, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea) agreed to support Equatorial Guinea for a two-year seat on the UNESCO executive board, when it meets in Paris in October. At the meeting UNESCO will name 27 new representatives to its 58-member board, as well as a new board president.

But UNESCO must still know that resuscitating the prize would mean publicly associating itself with the Obiang government’s extraordinary and now infamous record, that includes unlawful executions, torture,  international kidnappings, repression,  corruption,  nepotism, censorship, and questionable 95 percent plus election victories.

Equatorial Guinea’s current claims to be a pillar of stability and security in the region also ring hollow, given the facts:

• Drug trafficking:  The highly regarded Observatoire Géopolitique des Drogues (OGD), in Paris, first identified President Obiang’s government as a “narco-state”  in 1994, in which “the States or sectors of the State apparatus…profit directly, in a substantial degree, or even essentially, from the revenues of narcotics trafficking.”   In a 2001 report prepared for the Canadian Parliament, OGD’s  former head, Alain Labrousse, explained that  “in the case of Equatorial Guinea, diplomats belonging to the president’s family or clan used the diplomatic pouch and their immunity to engage in cocaine and heroin traffic around the world. Tens of them have been arrested over the past two decades, particularly in Spain.”   President Obiang’s current Attorney General, Carlos Mangue Elunku, is one Equatoguinean notable who was, according to Spanish press, detained for drugs in Spain – once in the 1980s and again in 1996. Lucas Nguema Esono, current Secretary General of President Obiang’s ruling political party, the Partido Democratico de Guinea Ecuatorial, was expelled from Spain in 1988 after trying to retrieve a suitcase with 340 grams of heroin and 18 kilos of marijuana.

• Arms trafficking:  According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Equatorial Guinea “is considered to be a country with a high risk of diversion” of weapons to unauthorized recipients. One of the world's most notorious global arms dealer s until his arrest by US agents in Thailand in 2008,Victor Bout – now on trial in New York for attempted sales to Colombian FARC rebels –  moved most of his aircraft registrations to Equatorial Guinea in 2001. In June 2009, when a Ukrainian aircraft made an emergency landing in Kano, Nigeria, authorities there found suspicious documentation and 18 crates of arms and ammunition, reportedly bound for Equatorial Guinea.  Suspecting possible arms diversion to Niger Delta rebels, Nigerian officials held the plane for weeks. Though Equatorial Guinea finally persuaded the Nigerians to release the plane, it was later revealed that the seized aircraft had recently been transferred to a cargo company formerly linked to two companies named in UN arms trafficking-related reports.
• Human trafficking:  Since 2001, the U.S. Department of State has issued an annual Trafficking in Persons Report, appraising countries’ efforts  to comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking.  Its most recent 2011 report, however, found that far from improving  protection for human trafficking victims, Equatorial Guinea has actually “decreased its efforts to prevent trafficking,” with the result that Equatorial Guinea was downgraded to join 22 other governments in the lowest “Tier 3” position.  The report found that Equatorial Guinea is principally a destination for trafficking of children, mainly for purposes of forced labor, as domestic servants, laborers, vendors and launderers. Victims come primarily from Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, and Gabon.

As President Obiang renews his bid to resuscitate the proposed $3-million science prize, UNESCO's board members should make it clear that they will not honor such a deplorable record.

The "presidents of the African continent, and other very important guests and visitors from around the world" will no doubt be awed by the "huge complex for the summit, which will have, for example, over 50 independent and exclusive dwellings, which will be occupied by African presidents attending the meeting."

The summit is the biggest international event of its kind staged in the country, paid for by the revenues that have been flowing since oil was discovered off its coast in the mid 1990s. President Obiang, who marked his 69th birthday on June 5, evidently hopes the summit will mark his emergence as a respected senior African statesman—despite a continuing stream of human rights abuses and the endemic corruption that has left the majority of the roughly 700,000 citizens of his oil-rich country mired in poverty.

The official theme of the African Union summit is "accelerating youth empowerment for sustainable development." But while the summit slogan has been given new immediacy by the youth-led rebellions in North Africa and the Middle East, President Obiang is taking no chances.

He has put a total news blackout on discussion of the Arab revolts, backed up by a security clampdown. On April 2—almost three months before the summit—the national security minister announced special measures to "ensure perfect security" for the summit, with a "massive presence of… the Security Corps….on the streets and districts of our cities…to carry out preparations of surveillance and dissuasion."

In the topsy-turvy logic of a ruler described recently by the New York Times as an "undisputed human rights global bad boy," the proper way to empower youth is to make them vanish—at least for a while. By government order, schools in Equatorial Guinea were closed for the summer on May 30, more than a month earlier than the normal term end. Talking about empowering the young people, it seems, takes priority over actually educating them.

In addition, opposition sources in the country report that the security forces are rounding up young people and detaining them, or sending them to their families in the countryside. (Many rural children are sent to live with relatives in the cities in order to be able to attend schools unavailable where they live.)

Obiang is nothing if not consistent. The young people of Equatorial Guinea have never been a high priority for his government. According to U.S. figures, Equatorial Guinea spends a lower portion of its GDP on education (0.6 per cent) than any other country measured.

Barely a third of those entering primary school even finish: of those measured, only four countries performed worse than Equatorial Guinea on primary school "survival," according to UNICEF, which also found Equatorial Guinea performing in the bottom five when it comes to immunizing its one-year-olds against such avoidable scourges as polio (39 percent immunized) and measles (51 percent immunized). For every 1,000 babies born alive, 145 die by the time they reach five years of age—only 13 countries showed worse records on this signature measure of childhood well-being.

Of course, as a rule, adults do not do very well in Equatorial Guinea either. Despite a per capita GDP of $37,900—more than Germany ($35,900), the United Kingdom ($35,100), Japan ($34,200), or France ($33,300)—some 77 per cent of the population live in poverty, according to the IMF. And the average Equatoguinean can expect to be dead at about age 51.

But there is at least one "youth" who has been doing rather well. Forty-three year old Teodorin Nguema, President Obiang’s eldest son and heir apparent, who heads up the ruling party’s youth section, has managed to support a globe-trotting lifestyle, jet-setting in his $38 million Gulf Stream V from one world fashion capital to another.

Not long ago, while staying in his $35 million beachfront Malibu mansion, he managed to accumulate a $9.5 million fleet of 32 motorcycles and automobiles, including seven Ferraris, five Bentleys, four Rolls Royces, two Lamborghinis, two Maybachs, two Mercedes, two Porches, one Aston-Martin, and one Bugatti. All this, while holding down his full-time $6,799-a-month day job as Minister of Forestry and Agriculture.

It seems that almost everyone who hears about it is moved to protest the disconnect between UNESCO’s noble mission and its cuckoo plan to slap its name onto a science prize named for and funded by President Teodoro Obiang, a dictator linked to criminal or regulatory money-laundering investigations in three countries, a man whose 31-year reign has saddled the country with some of the worst health and development indicators in the world—despite oil revenues that put its per capita GDP in line with Italy or Spain.

Facing a global outcry against the award, Obiang has tried to fire back with some good old-fashioned do-gooding to prove he is a worthy namesake.

As any good philanthropist would do, the president looked around and saw a critical need no one was filling—the country’s educational system. It certainly could use the help: net enrollment in primary education dropped from 96.7 percent in 1991, prior to the discovery of oil, to 69.4 percent in 2007, in a school system often described as corrupt and incompetent. In 2009, for example, the U.S. Department of State reported that “[t]eachers with political connections but no experience or accreditation were hired even though they seldom appeared at the classes the purportedly taught.”

It’s also a school system whose budget—4 percent of government expenditures, lowest portion in the world according to UNDP—apparently can’t even cover the cost of notebooks for the kids. So the president generously “donated” from his own pocket a "wealth of" notebooks for every one of the country’s school districts. And in case the kids or their parents have trouble remembering who their benefactor was, the president thoughtfully placed his own picture on the cover.

Photo of school notebooks emblazoned with a picture of President Teodoro Obiang.

Still, you might say, at least the notebooks seem to have gotten to the kids. But last week also saw another, harsher side to the government’s educational interventions. On October 3, twelve eager high school graduates gathered at Malabo airport to head off to Spain and begin their long-awaited university education. Chosen from a group of 300 top-performing students in a transparent, merit-based process, Spain had agreed to finance the students’ studies as part of a program established last year between the two governments.

But, unfortunately for the students, a key government figure was left out of the selection process—Education Minister Filiberto Ntutumu Nguema, the former secretary-general of President Obiang’s ruling “Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea” (PDGE) and campaign manger of the president’s landslide 95.6 percent re-election victory last November. Just as the students were getting on the plane, EG security forces, reportedly acting on the orders of the Minister, barred them from boarding and confiscated their passports. The same thing happened to another group of students the following day.  Opposition political figures accused Ntutumu of throttling the scholarship program because he opposed an objective selection process, preferring, instead, to control allocation, directing scholarships to the politically favored and/or those who would pay for them.

You can take that opposition view with a grain of salt. But we do know how the U.S. scholarship programs financed by the oil companies in 2001–2003 were run: after a close look at the programs, a U.S. Senate subcommittee found that “Many of [the 100-plus EG students receiving the scholarship] appeared to be children or relatives of wealthy or powerful E.G. officials,” and these silver-spooners apparently didn’t have to fret about academic pressures. Only five of them, bank files showed [view pdf] (see Annex 18), were able to maintain the supposedly required minimum “B” grade average.

With breath-taking dispatch, the four men—José Abeso Nsue, Manuel Ndong Anseme, Alipio Ndong Asumu, and Jacinto Michá Obiang—were tried, sentenced, and executed. Everything was over in less than 10 days.

On August 22, the court handed down its capital sentence, and within an hour, the men were executed. Mr. Abeso Nsue reportedly asked to see his family before execution, but was dead by the time his wife and son got to the prison. Military tribunals in Equatorial Guinea do not provide for any rights of appeal.

According to Amnesty International, the military officers assigned to represent the four refugees had no legal training. Exile opposition sources note that when highly regarded Equatoguinean human rights lawyer Fabián Nsue volunteered to defend the men, the tribunal refused. The military court reportedly relied on confessions extracted under torture.

This was not the first time Equatoguinean forces kidnapped political dissidents from foreign countries. Amnesty International reported on 12 such kidnappings, in Nigeria, Gabon, Benin, and Cameroon, from 2004 to 2008.

Only a month before the latest kidnappings—possibly even as the crime was being planned—the UN Human Rights Council concluded its Universal Periodic Review of Equatorial Guinea’s human rights practices, issuing a draft report on December 11, 2009.  The report included earnest-sounding responses from Equatorial Guinea’s diplomats, who insisted that the human rights situation was improving, but also acknowledged that “a lot still needs to be done.” Surprising many observers, the thirteen-member EG delegation accepted 86 wide-ranging recommendations from the UPR working group, including important commitments to:

• Thoroughly investigate all reports of abductions and introduce a registry of prisoners available to the public
• End arbitrary arrests and detention and the practice of secret detention
• End the torture and other mistreatment of detainees
• Disallow confessions obtained through torture and ensure all allegations of torture are properly investigated and those responsible held accountable
• Bring the organization, functioning, and competence of military tribunals into conformity with international principles

There can be little doubt that this proceeding had—at least—President Obiang’s okay. As the US Department of State reports, although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary in Equatorial Guinea:

the government [does] not respect this provision in practice, and the judiciary [is] not independent, according to UN officials and local and international human rights advocates. Judges serve at the pleasure of the president and [are] appointed, transferred, and dismissed for political as well as competency reasons. Judicial corruption [is] widely reported, and cases [are] sometimes decided on political grounds….The president appoints the members of the Supreme Court, who reportedly took instructions from him. The Supreme Council of the Judicial Power appoints and controls judges. President Obiang is president of the Supreme Council, and the president of the Supreme Court is the vice president of the Supreme Council.

Yet President Obiang likes to blame his troubles on the bad faith of international NGOs seeking sensationalistic media attention.

“Evaluate us by our actions…and not according to the flow of news from negative sources,” he pleaded in June.

As part of a global charm campaign, Obiang is paying lobbyist/adviser (and former Clinton aide) Lanny Davis a million dollars a year. And EG’s $55,000-a-month PR firm Qorvis seems to be issuing upbeat press releases almost weekly: “Equatorial Guinea President Pledges Environmental Conservation”; “Equatorial Guinea Advances Public Health Through Education”; “Equatorial Guinea Sponsors National Literary Prize Contest to Promote Culture and Literacy in Society.”

Nevertheless, much of the news this year has not been so sunny. In April, Equatorial Guinea got the boot from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative for failing to meet minimum benchmarks for revenue transparency. Barely three months later, Obiang’s effort to buy respectability blew up in his face when global protest about his regime’s poor governance record and alleged corruption forced UNESCO to suspend the $3 million UNESCO-Obiang life sciences prize he had pledged to fund.

Despite the best efforts of Obiang and his public relations team, this week’s sordid saga of cross-border kidnapping, a kangaroo trial, and high-speed executions shows that Obiang has only contempt for international law and justice and for the rights of his own citizens. He takes his own solemn promises to reform no more seriously than anyone else.