President’s playboy son jails expats to fight villa seizures

The vice-president of Equatorial ­Guinea is not put off his stride by the ­inconveniences of international sanctions or foreign convictions for embezzlement and seizures of his ­supercars and mansions.
Teodoro Nguema Obiang’s social media feed is crammed with images of his luxury villas, private jets and designer watches, and the occasional official engagement.
But after being stripped of assets worth hundreds of millions of pounds by foreign authorities over the past decade, Obiang, 56, the playboy son of the country’s president and also the de facto head of its feared security services, is showing signs of irritation.
After the most recent seizures, of a superyacht and two villas in South Africa in February last year, he lashed out at the “white slaver lawyers” who had brought the case, and threatened to bar the country’s ships and planes from the waters and airspace of his oil-rich state.
Soon after, two South African contractors were arrested by the Equator­ial Guinean police on drug-trafficking charges. At their trial Frik Potgieter and Peter Huxham were found guilty, des­pite flimsy evidence, jailed for 12 years and fined the equivalent of £4 million.
A recent visit to Equatorial ­Guinea by Naledi Pandor, then South Africa’s foreign minister, confirmed suspicions that the arrests were retaliatory. ­The men would be shown mercy once ­Obiang’s assets were returned, sources told the Daily Maverick site.
Meeting such demands is not in ­Pretoria’s gift, however: the court-ordered seizures arose from a separate, longstanding civil case that suggests Obiang’s appetite for vengeance.
In 2021 the high court in Cape Town ordered Obiang to pay 40 million rand in compensation — about £2 million at the time — to a South African businessman over his unlawful arrest and torture. Daniel Janse van Rensburg had spent more than 500 days behind bars in Equatorial Guinea after striking a deal with a member of the ruling family that went sour.
“This is a case that epitomises a sheer abuse of power and authority by the ­defendant,” the court ruled. Obiang “was hellbent to ensure that the plaintiff does not leave prison and that he was tortured and abused”.
In the same year Britain sanctioned Equatorial Guinea’s vice-president for misappropriating millions of pounds, and a French court ordered the seizure of assets worth about £90 million that included a mansion in Paris and garages filled with sports cars. Last year Obiang’s ­67m superyacht The Blue Shadow was seized in Cape Town along with two luxury properties as collateral in the Janse van Rensburg case.
Obiang argued that the vessel, which had recently been cruising the Mediterranean, belonged to the country’s Ministry of Defence.
Since President Obiang came to power in a coup in 1979, riding a wave created by the discovery of oil in the former Spanish colony, there has been little separation between what belongs to the state and the ruling family. The Blue Shadow was later allowed to return to Equatorial Guinea but the Cape Town properties, which Obiang has never visited, have fallen into disrepair.
Potgieter, 54, and Huxham, 55, a dual South African-British citizen, who are employed by the Dutch oil-service company SBM Offshore, are facing more than a decade in the notorious Oveng Azem maximum-security prison in the eastern city of Mongomo.
On Saturday the men were allowed a rare phone call to their families in South Africa. It is now more than 550 days since they were arrested for allegedly having drugs in their suitcases, which were still secured with combination locks and unopened days after the alleged evidence was found.
“There is no forward movement in terms of them being released. They could sit for a long time. It’s scary,” Shaun Murphy, a family spokesman, said.
The Equatorial Guinea government has been approached for comment.