More About that Malibu Mansion the Son of an African Dictator Must Sell

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One of the largest mansions in Malibu will be sold and most of the proceeds given to charity under an agreement reached by the federal Justice Department and the African government official who owned it, it was reported today.

The second vice president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Nguema Obiang, is also losing exotic cars, a collection of Michael Jackson statues and costumes, and cash in the settlement, announced Friday by the Justice Department in Washington.

“Through relentless embezzlement and extortion, Vice President Nguema Obiang shamelessly looted his country to support his lavish lifestyle, and shook down businesses in his country to support his lavish lifestyle, while many of his fellow citizens lived in extreme poverty,” said Leslie Caldwell, an assistant U.S. Attorney, in a statement obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

The gigantic mansion and compound had been patrolled by private security guards from the African nation, armed with automatic weapons, sheriff’s deputies told the Malibu newspaper. It has a three-hole golf course, ponds, a tennis court and 15,000 square feet in the main house.

Inside a gated subdivision, it commands a bluff-top view of the tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the skyscrapers of downtown L.A., and Point Dume. The mansion is just above the Malibu Pier, and several hundred yards from the controversial ridgeline where U2 musician David “The Edge” Ellis and four associates want to build houses, a controversy that has boiled for several years.

The Justice Department was alerted to the looting of the treasury in Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich coastal nation with an impoverished and hungry populace, and began cracking down on currency violations in 2006. News that the $30 million mansion purchase was first reported by the Malibu Surfside News, which also reported that Malibu locals were shocked and largely unhappy to learn of the deal.

As part of its “Kleptocracy Initiative,” the Justice Department vowed to crack down on corrupt foreign officials, who have looted their own governments or given themselves valuable concessions such as oil leases. Obiang had been given a governor seat and ownership of Equatorial Guinea’s radio and TV stations by his father, the president.

He claimed to have first entered the United States as a student at Malibu’s Pepperdine University, but the school was reported in 2006 to have checked its records and said he had never been admitted.

Under terms of the new deal, one third of the proceeds from the mansion sale will go to the U.S. government, and two thirds will go to supervised charities for the benefit of the people of Equatorial Guinea.

--City News Service

PHOTO Teodoro Nguema Obiang. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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