Like whipsawing Native American tribes running casinos in neighboring states, Jack was pushing Gabon's strongman to pony up, fast.
Seems there's big oil in Equatorial Guinea, next door to Gabon.
Of course, also close by is Riggs Bank and Jonathan Bush:
Bank, Big Oil tied to African paymentsby Richard B. Schmitt And Kathleen Hennessey
Los Angeles Times July 15/2004
Washington: American oil companies made millions of dollars in questionable payments to relatives and friends of the president of tiny Equatorial Guinea, which "may have contributed to corrupt practices in that country," Senate investigators said in a report released late Wednesday.
The findings are contained in a new report examining the relationship between the West African nation and its despotic ruler, and the venerable Riggs Bank in Washington, an old-line financial institution that has served diplomats and aristocrats for years.
SNIP...
ExxonMobil Corp., one of the largest operators in the region, formed an oil-distribution venture with a firm controlled by Equatorial Guinea's president, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the report found. Another oil giant, Amerada Hess Corp., purchased security services from a company owned by the president's brother, who has been accused in State Department reports of torture, and leased a building from a 14-year-old relative of the president, the investigators determined.
SNIP...
Riggs Bank was a distribution point for the oil companies' largess, as well as a repository for the wealth of Obiang, his family and their various business interests, the report found.
The report found that Riggs accepted millions of dollars in cash deposits sealed in plastic, and helped Obiang create companies overseas to which millions of dollars were wired. The country was the bank's largest client, with total deposits in 2003 ranging from $400 million to $700 million, mainly from royalties from oil production, investigators said. The bank has total assets of about $6.3 billion.
SNIP...
Riggs opened multiple personal accounts for Obiang, his wife and other relatives, helped establish shell corporations overseas for the president and his son, and "facilitated" nearly $13 million in cash deposits into Riggs accounts controlled by Obiang and his wife, including $3 million for an account opened in the name of a Bahamian shell corporation he owned called Otong S.A.
Riggs also allowed wire transfers totaling more than $35 million from an Equatorial Guinea government account at the bank that received funds from oil companies – to companies including one that investigators said they believed that Obiang controlled.
Bank officials also accommodated a number of requests for large transactions with few questions asked. On six occasions between 2000 and 2002, the report found, Riggs accepted cash deposits of $1 million or more for the Otong account, totaling $11.5 million. Some of the money was brought into the bank in suitcases by Kareri, the account manager, in unopened, plastic-wrapped bundles, the report said.
CONTINUED...
http://www.odiousdebts.org/odiousdebts/index.cfm?DSP=content&ContentID=10869 Small world. Full of coincidences.
African PillagersBy Douglas Farah
Washington Post
Sunday, April 23, 2006
EXCERPT...
Indeed, his trial was resisted by many African leaders precisely because so much of the continent is still ruled by megalomaniacal "Big Men," who should be held accountable for the systematic destruction of their own countries. Some of the worst include Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, who has pillaged his country since 1979; Omar Bongo, who has ruled Gabon since Lyndon Johnson was president; Robert Mugabe's kleptocracy in Zimbabwe; and the teetering dictatorship of Idriss Deby in Chad.
SNIP...
One of the richest and most repressive of this group is Obiang, since 1979 the ruler of the only Spanish-speaking nation in Africa. In 2004 Riggs Bank admitted criminal liability for illegally taking Obiang's illegal proceeds. In the late 1990s, according to a 2004 report by the Senate's subcommittee on investigations, Obiang and his cronies had at least $700 million in Riggs, making Equatorial Guinea the bank's single largest depositor. At the same time, his country's inhabitants were wallowing near the bottom of almost every global index of health, literacy and life expectancy.
Obiang seized power by murdering his predecessor and uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema. Obiang was Macias's chief of police and ran the notorious Black Beach prison, where Macias reportedly showed up to execute prisoners by smashing their heads with concrete poles. Now Obiang runs a police state of his own, surrounded by Moroccan bodyguards because he doesn't trust anyone, even his own family.
He survives in part because his tiny country pumps 350,000 barrels of oil a day and has reserves of 1.2 billion barrels, along with 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. As a result, oil companies and governments are willing to support a regime that has long since silenced the press, driven almost a third of its population of 540,000 into exile and crushed any hint of dissent.
In recent months Obiang has been making overtures, through the offer of oil deals, to the leader of one of Africa's most astonishing stories of failure--Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. In recent years Mugabe, who took office in 1980 as a national hero, has gradually strangled his nation's political life and economy. He now controls the closest thing the region has to the Disneyland for terrorists and transnational criminal groups that Taylor created in Liberia.
SNIP...
Omar Bongo, another Obiang neighbor and friend, has ruled Gabon with an iron hand since 1967, when LBJ was trying to decide how to get out of Vietnam. He has made his son the minister of defense to ensure loyalty in the armed forces and brooks no dissent. Concerned about his international image, he was in contact with now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the summer of 2003. Abramoff asked for $9 million to help Bongo cozy up to the Bush administration, according to documents later released by Congress. It is not clear if the deal was consummated, but on May 26, 2004, Bongo met with President Bush.
CONTINUED...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101760.html Thank you for the important info, starroute. We need computerization to keep tabs with all the criminality by those the nation entrusts, let alone the the stuff we know about by sleazebags who've managed to get put behind bars.
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