Mugabe paid US$20 million for stopping Equatorial Guinea coup?

By Lance Guma
28 November 2005

A Spanish based website, El Muni which is run by Equato-Guineans reports that Robert Mugabe was personally paid US$20 million as a ‘thank you’ gesture after his government thwarted an attempted coup in the Equatorial Guinea. The publication run by anti-government activists alleges that the payment was made into Mugabe’s private accounts in September this year. The payment is part of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s thank you gesture for what he termed ‘Mugabe’s decisive contribution in apprehending the mercenaries’.

The US$20 million Mugabe received is said to have been part of US$700 million that was repatriated from the United States. In another report carried by the ZW News website the funds are said to have been held at Riggs Bank in Washington DC, bankers for, amongst others, Chile’s General Pinochet, members of the Saudi royal family, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea. The bank was the subject of a recent US Senate investigation, which found that it had facilitated money laundering by Pinochet, Obiang, and others.

The Senate was told of one bank executive who deposited US$3 million in shrink-wrapped dollar bills on behalf of Obiang. The repatriated US$700 million was supposedly to be used for infrastructural projects in Equatorial Guinea, but El Mundi claims the funds were moved first to the Bank of Central African States, and from there to accounts in China, Angola, Morocco and South Africa. The alleged personal payment to Mugabe is in addition to other honours heaped on the Zimbabwe president.

Obiang has already conferred on him the Grand Collar of the Order of Independence. The president of the Equatorial Guinean parliament called him "the saviour of Equatorial Guinea", and he was given the freedom of the capital Malabo, and proclaimed "dear child of the nation" by the mayor.