give us extra money here and we’ll give you extra money there. The only losers in this understanding, of course, were the destitute people of Equatorial Guinea.
To see, on a transactional level, how plunder is achieved, and how an oil firm might funnel a bribe to a president, it’s useful to look into the affairs of Abayak S.A., a mysterious company that was widely believed to be owned by Obiang and that even a Riggs memo described as “a significant earner of income for the President.” Was this the conduit through which American companies slipped money into Obiang’s already bulging pockets? The Senate report found a number of unusual payments to Abayak. For example, Marathon negotiated a deal to purchase land from Abayak for more than $2 million; a partial payment was executed with a check for $611,000 made out to Obiang himself. Marathon was involved in a joint venture to operate two natural gas plants with GEOGAM, an obscure company in which Abayak held a 75 percent stake. And so on.
But nobody seemed to know what Abayak did. Were these payments for actual goods and services?
I thought the answer might be found in Bata, the largest city on the mainland portion of Equatorial Guinea. Like Malabo, Bata retained a sense of postcolonial languor, with ramshackle Spanish architecture of the one-story variety and semiderelict streets with potholes a mule could disappear into. The pool at the town’s finest hotel, which was not fine, was filled with a foot of greenish murk, and even the hotel’s name—Pan-Africa—was a throwback to another era. Yet the biggest office building in the country at the time, reaching to seven stories, had just been completed there, and because it was known as Abayak’s headquarters—the company’s name was emblazoned at the top—I visited it in the hope of talking with an executive or two.
At the ground-floor reception area, I was told that the firm’s officeswere on the top floor. When I went there, I found that four of the six offices were vacant and unfurnished. Doors to the two remaining offices were locked and unmarked. If this was Abayak’s headquarters, it seemed unfathomably modest for a firm that had been selected as a strategic partner by the largest oil companies in the world.
Perhaps the receptionist was wrong; maybe Abayak’s offices were on another floor. I checked every floor and saw that the offices were either empty—most were—or occupied by other entities. Even the Ministry of Information official who accompanied me was flummoxed. Where was Abayak? And, more to the point, what was Abayak?
There were answers in Malabo. A British businessman told me that as far as he knew, Abayak functioned as a vehicle through which payments were made in exchange for the president’s approval of business projects. An African banker I talked with called Abayak a “holding company” that, he confirmed, had no offices. Indeed, there was no Abayak office in Malabo that I could locate. It was not possible to ask the president to solve the mystery—my requests for an interview were declined—so I went to the next-best source, his son Gabriel Nguema Lima, who, in the fashion of family regimes, was vice minister of mines, industry and energy. Nguema was in his twenties.
His office was in the ministry headquarters, a modest two-story building where a rooster was pecking around the front yard. His office had a flat-screen computer but was not large; in most governments it would house a midlevel civil servant. It was air-conditioned by a wheezing wall unit that belonged in a junkyard. Adorning the wall was Nguema’s diploma from Alma College in Michigan and his varsity soccer letter from a Michigan prep school, Cranbrook Kingswood. Odd as it seemed, this presidential son was a pseudopreppy, and odder still, given the ways of his tennis-playing father and his Malibu-dwelling half brother, he didn’t seem ostentatious. He was, nearly everyone said, the best hope for the country’s
To see, on a transactional level, how plunder is achieved, and how an oil firm might funnel a bribe to a president, it’s useful to look into the affairs of Abayak S.A., a mysterious company that was widely believed to be owned by Obiang and that even a Riggs memo described as “a significant earner of income for the President.” Was this the conduit through which American companies slipped money into Obiang’s already bulging pockets? The Senate report found a number of unusual payments to Abayak. For example, Marathon negotiated a deal to purchase land from Abayak for more than $2 million; a partial payment was executed with a check for $611,000 made out to Obiang himself. Marathon was involved in a joint venture to operate two natural gas plants with GEOGAM, an obscure company in which Abayak held a 75 percent stake. And so on.
But nobody seemed to know what Abayak did. Were these payments for actual goods and services?
I thought the answer might be found in Bata, the largest city on the mainland portion of Equatorial Guinea. Like Malabo, Bata retained a sense of postcolonial languor, with ramshackle Spanish architecture of the one-story variety and semiderelict streets with potholes a mule could disappear into. The pool at the town’s finest hotel, which was not fine, was filled with a foot of greenish murk, and even the hotel’s name—Pan-Africa—was a throwback to another era. Yet the biggest office building in the country at the time, reaching to seven stories, had just been completed there, and because it was known as Abayak’s headquarters—the company’s name was emblazoned at the top—I visited it in the hope of talking with an executive or two.
At the ground-floor reception area, I was told that the firm’s officeswere on the top floor. When I went there, I found that four of the six offices were vacant and unfurnished. Doors to the two remaining offices were locked and unmarked. If this was Abayak’s headquarters, it seemed unfathomably modest for a firm that had been selected as a strategic partner by the largest oil companies in the world.
Perhaps the receptionist was wrong; maybe Abayak’s offices were on another floor. I checked every floor and saw that the offices were either empty—most were—or occupied by other entities. Even the Ministry of Information official who accompanied me was flummoxed. Where was Abayak? And, more to the point, what was Abayak?
There were answers in Malabo. A British businessman told me that as far as he knew, Abayak functioned as a vehicle through which payments were made in exchange for the president’s approval of business projects. An African banker I talked with called Abayak a “holding company” that, he confirmed, had no offices. Indeed, there was no Abayak office in Malabo that I could locate. It was not possible to ask the president to solve the mystery—my requests for an interview were declined—so I went to the next-best source, his son Gabriel Nguema Lima, who, in the fashion of family regimes, was vice minister of mines, industry and energy. Nguema was in his twenties.
His office was in the ministry headquarters, a modest two-story building where a rooster was pecking around the front yard. His office had a flat-screen computer but was not large; in most governments it would house a midlevel civil servant. It was air-conditioned by a wheezing wall unit that belonged in a junkyard. Adorning the wall was Nguema’s diploma from Alma College in Michigan and his varsity soccer letter from a Michigan prep school, Cranbrook Kingswood. Odd as it seemed, this presidential son was a pseudopreppy, and odder still, given the ways of his tennis-playing father and his Malibu-dwelling half brother, he didn’t seem ostentatious. He was, nearly everyone said, the best hope for the country’s
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