As noted in these previous posts, the tiny West African dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea is one fascinating place.
Quashed coups (five since 1996) are so routine in Equatorial Guinea that some wags observe that the the government stages them like Broadway plays to add luster to its macho image. The latest coup last year was the stuff of novels, involving a highly dysfunctional ruling family, a rap-music-producing heir apparent who drives a Lamborghini, and a political opponent in exile who contends that Equatorial Guinea’s dictator is a cannibal who particularly enjoys eating human gonads. The coup also allegedly involved a Lebanese front company, Sir Mark Thatcher (here and here and about 100 mercenaries from South Africa, Germany, Armenia and Kazakhstan. Add to that background the fact that Equatorial Guinea has huge oil and gas reserves that many Western exploration and production companies are competing to develop and you have a tempest of international intrigue and corruption.
Against that colorful backdrop, Simon Kareri, a former Riggs Bank senior vice president and his wife, Nene Fall Kareri, were arrested yesterday in Washington on fraud, conspiracy and money laundering charges related to accounts at the bank of the Equatorial Guinea government, which formerly was the bank’s largest customer.
Riggs Bank, which is now owned by PNC Financial Services Group Inc., pleaded guilty in January to a felony charge of failing to report suspicious transactions involving foreigners, including former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and members of his family. The bank also agreed to pay a $16 million fine, which the bank paid on top of a record $25 million civil fine that Treasury Department assessed against the bank last ago.
Mr. Kareri was Riggs’ senior international banking manager and has been a target of a federal grand jury investigation since he took the Fifth Amendment at a Senate subcommittee hearing investigating U.S. oil company investments in Equatorial Guinea last July. In an example of a typical transaction, Senate investigators found payments totaling almost a half million dollars from a big U.S. oil company into the account of a 14-year-old relative of Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, earmarked for “renting office space.”
Life really is stranger than fiction.