Teodorin Obiang and asset recovery

Tena Prelec and Georgia Garrod

What happened?

The case of Teodorin Obiang is an emblematic case for the study of kleptocracy, corrupt capital flows and asset recovery. His father Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago, one of Africa's longest-serving leaders, came to power by military coup in Equatorial Guinea in 1979. Obiang Sr's early authoritarian predisposition worsened with the discovery of huge offshore oil deposits in the early 1990s. Between 1993 and 2007, annual government oil revenues increased more than a thousand-fold, shooting up from $2.1 million to $3.9 billion; in the same period, a vast amount of this money was siphoned offshore, into the Obiang family's private bank accounts. A significant portion of these funds was deposited there by US oil companies (Firger : 1045). 2010

While Equatorial Guineans continued to live in abject poverty, the Obiang family made no effort to hide their riches. Teodorin, in particular, spent ostentatiously in some of the world's most expensive locations. In 2006, when he was earning an official monthly salary of $5,000 as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Teodorin bought himself a $30 million mansion overlooking the Pacific in Malibu, California, through a US limited liability company (Burgis 2020: 201). Shortly thereafter, he also purchased a $127 million six-storey mansion in Paris, decorated with more than $47 million worth of furniture (Chrisafis 2017).

Western firms offering professional services, particularly in the US, had long been accused of complicity in the movement of the Obiang family's illicitly gained wealth. A notable example was Riggs Bank in Washington, where members of the Obiang family controlled multiple accounts into which hundreds of millions of dollars from oil revenues were deposited (Silverstein 2011).

Following sanctions against Riggs for violating money-laundering regulations, the Obiang family were supported by US-based lawyers to set up a web of shell companies that would “defraud US financial institutions regarding [Obiang’s] relationship to accounts opened” (Adams 2012). Global Witness tracked the case for a decade and reported that Teodorin Obiang funnelled around $75 million into the US between 2005 and 2007. The Obiangs also retained the services of Washington PR firm Qorvis Communications, which sent out “scores of press releases highlighting all manner of good deeds by the Obiang government” (Lynch 2010).