Coming To America (to launder his millions?)

[Geee]

UK Independent:

Question: how did an African politician, on an official salary of roughly $6,000 a month, manage to acquire the lifestyle of a Hollywood billionaire, partying at the Playboy mansion, travelling in private jets, and living at a $30m Malibu mansion filled with impressionist artwork, and surrounded by its own private golf course?

Answer: simple. First, that politician was lucky enough to be Teodoro Nguema Obiang, heir apparent to the autocratic dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny country in West Africa which since discovering huge oil reserves in the mid 1990s has acquired the dubious distinction of having one of the world’s most spectacularly-corrupt governments.

Secondly, Obiang was able to find a pair of high-flying Beverly Hills lawyers who – in exchange for extravagant fees - were prepared to set up an opaque string of shell companies that allowed him to secretly control dozens of US bank accounts through which tens of millions of his ill-gotten dollars could be laundered.

That, at least, is the claim made in an extraordinary 118-page lawsuit filed this week by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which is attempting to persuade a judge to confiscate some of Obiang’s most treasured possessions, including his Malibu Home, his Ferrari car, and his collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia, which includes seven life-sized statues of the singer, along with a white cotton glove worn on his 1987 “Bad” tour.

The document sheds unprecedented detail on the alleged schemes by which Obiang used his role as Forestry Minister in his father’s government for personal enrichment. And it unpicks the dubious steps his lawyers then took to, in the words of the DOJ, “defraud” a string of US banks into providing a safe haven for that illegally-acquired wealth.

[clearvision]

I would not want to be the lawyers who set these schemes up.

[Pepper]

Obiang autocratic dictator

Obama autocratic narcissist

 

Coincidence? You be the judge