The dictator’s son wanted his yacht back. That’s when trouble started
Vice President Teodorin “Teddy" Nguema Obiang was in a mood for payback. The Obiangs have run the oil-rich Central African country of Equatorial Guinea like a family ATM since 1979, accumulating mansions in Paris and Malibu, Ferraris and Bugattis, and at least three superyachts, according to court documents. And now a South African court was seizing Nguema Obiang’s two high-end Cape Town villas and the Blue Shadow, the yacht that carries his jet-ski collection while he vacations on one of the other two.
He lashed out at “racist scammers" and “white slaver lawyers from Cape Town." He threatened to bar South African ships from Equatorial Guinea’s waters and South African planes from its airspace. Days later, Equatorial Guinean police arrested two South African oil workers, accused them of trafficking cocaine and threw them in prison. The men’s family members, employers and U.S.
officials say their arrest was direct retaliation against South Africa by Nguema Obiang, son of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and de facto head of the country’s feared security services. “This is something that Teodorin is known to do," says Mark L. Asquino, a former U.S.
ambassador to Equatorial Guinea and now a senior adviser to Horizon Engage, a New York-based political risk consulting firm. “He can be quite vengeful." A year on, the oil workers, Frederik Potgieter, 54 years old, and Peter Huxham, 55, remain in an isolated prison in a forest clearing deep in the Central African hinterlands. Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador in Washington says that, as far as the government is concerned, justice is being done to a pair of drug dealers in a case that has nothing to do with the vice president’s assets.
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