There Goes The Neighborhood

Friday, January 19, 2007

A Malibu neighborhood that is. I found the title rather appropriate for a story currently running in LA Weekly (found via Boing Boing).

LA Weekly writes about the purchase of a $35 million-dollar, 16-acre Malibu estate in April 2006, by Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of Equatorial Guinea’s President/Dictator Teodoro Obiang. Forbes lists this sale as the sixth most expensive home sale in the US, in 2006. Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is also next in line to take over after his father.

Some bits from the story:

Perhaps his politically active Malibu neighbors don’t know that Equatorial Guinea, on the west coast of Africa, with only 540,000 inhabitants, has neither a free press nor free speech. Its people are among the world’s poorest, surviving on less than $1 a day, yet because of plentiful oil and natural gas, the country is the second richest in gross domestic product per capita, just behind wealthy Luxembourg.

...

A rare mention of his arrival in Malibu appeared in a disapproving editorial in the Los Angeles Times late last year — strangely without any news report in the rest of the paper. Of the Malibu newspapers, only the Graphic at Pepperdine University has mentioned that the record-high home sale involves an exceedingly controversial buyer with a globally newsworthy dark side.

Robert E. Williams, associate professor of political science at Pepperdine, tried to alert Malibu papers, but never heard back from reporters. “My guess is that the small local papers don’t want to explore this story, as a big part of their revenue comes from real estate advertising,” Williams says.

...

Watchdog groups and experts estimate the loot siphoned off by the Obiang family ranges from $300 million to $800 million — per year.

On human rights:

Amnesty International found that political opponents are routinely imprisoned and ordinary people thrown out of their homes without warning, to make room for “urban development” by the Obiangs. Transparency International rates Equatorial Guinea 152nd out of 159 countries on its human-rights index, listing it one of the worst for family-controlled government corruption. Sex trafficking and child labor reported by the CIA in 2006 are so extensive that Equatorial Guinea ranks at the bottom of the U.N.’s Human Development Index, below Kazakhstan, Syria and Algeria.

...

“Our promotion of human rights and democracy is in keeping with America’s most cherished principles and it helps to lay the foundation for lasting peace in the world,” said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a speech on human rights in 2006.

Shortly after that, she welcomed her “good friend” President Teodoro Obiang to Washington on an official state visit.

Far be it for me to moral pass judgment on this without knowing all the facts, but W. O. W.

The full article is lengthy, but I recommend reading through it. It presents a lot of interesting information, including Exxon-Mobile’s involvements and interests in Equatorial Guinea. Fascinating stuff, indeed.