http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17visa.html?


November 17, 2009
African Official Retains American Access
By IAN URBINA

Several times every year, Teodoro Nguema Obiang arrives at the doorstep of the United States from his home in Equatorial Guinea, on his way to his $35 million estate in Malibu, his fleet of luxury cars, his speedboats and private jet. And he is always let into the country.

The nation’s doors are open to Mr. Obiang, the agriculture minister of Equatorial Guinea and the son of its ruler, even though federal law enforcement officials believe “most if not all” of his wealth comes from corruption related to the extensive oil and gas reserves discovered more than a decade and a half ago off the coast of his tiny West African country, according to internal Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents.

And they are open despite a federal law and a presidential proclamation that prohibit corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving an American visa.

Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in the State Department, said she was prohibited from discussing specific visa decisions. But other former and current State Department officials said that Equatorial Guinea’s close ties to the American oil industry were the reason for the lax enforcement of the law. Production of the country’s nearly 400,000 barrels of oil a day is dominated by American companies like ExxonMobil, Hess and Marathon.

“Of course it’s because of oil,” said John Bennett, the United States ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, adding that Washington has always turned a blind eye to the Obiangs’ corruption and repression because of its dependence on the country for natural resources. He noted that officials of Zimbabwe are barred from the United States.

“Both countries are severely repressive,” said Mr. Bennett, who is now a senior foreign affairs officer for the State Department in Baghdad. “But if Zimbabwe had Equatorial Guinea’s oil, Zimbabwean officials wouldn’t still be blocked from the U.S.”

Shown the Justice Department documents that detail the accusations of corruption against Mr. Obiang, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat of Vermont who wrote the law restricting visas, expressed frustration and anger with the State Department, which is responsible for enforcing the law at the border.

“The fact that someone like Mr. Obiang continues to travel freely here suggests strongly that the State Department is not yet applying the law as vigorously as Congress intended,” Mr. Leahy said. The law he wrote was partly inspired by the accusations of corruption surrounding Mr. Obiang’s family and the Equatorial Guinean government, according to Mr. Leahy’s staff.

“There are many instances of corrupt foreign officials plundering the natural resources of their countries for their own use, while their people starve,” he said. “The law states clearly that if you do that, you are no longer welcome in the United States.”

Daniel Whitman, who retired in September as the deputy director of the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs, agreed that the law should be used more forcefully.

“We just seem to lack the backbone to use this prohibition,” Mr. Whitman said. “In the rare cases it is used, no one at State was willing to talk about it.”

When asked how many times the laws have been used to bar corrupt foreign officials from entering the country, State Department officials declined, citing privacy reasons, though Ms. Pittman said thousands of visas had been denied to corrupt officials using other legal means. A 2007 State Department report said the presidential proclamation, signed by President George W. Bush in 2004, had been used “dozens” of times.

A State Department official who handles investigations of corruption said that while the measures are important tools, the department as a matter of policy does not want to reveal the number of times they have been used because it would show that the number is actually quite small. The official asked not to be identified because of departmental rules prohibiting public comment.

The Justice Department memorandum, dated Sept. 4, 2007, and obtained by The New York Times, said the government believes Mr. Obiang’s assets are derived “from extortion, theft of public funds or other corrupt conduct.” From April 2005 to April 2006, the memo said, Mr. Obiang funneled at least $73 million into the United States, using shell corporations and offshore bank accounts to launder the money and ultimately buy his Malibu estate and a luxury jet.

The memo identified several specific wire transfers by Mr. Obiang from 2005 and 2006, beginning with a bank in Equatorial Guinea, then going to the central Banque de France, and landing in American accounts at Wachovia, Bank of America and UBS. In one six-week period alone in 2006, Mr. Obiang transferred $33,799,799.99 to the United States, the memo said, which was used to purchase a Gulfstream V jet.

Part of his wealth, the memo said, comes from a “revolutionary tax” that Mr. Obiang placed on timber. Instead of sending the payments to the coffers of Equatorial Guinea, Mr. Obiang, who is considered likely to be a successor to his father, has “insisted that the payments be made directly to him,” the memo said.

In addition, the memo said, the Justice Department believes Mr. Obiang “may be receiving bribes or extortion payments” from the oil companies as a percentage of their contracts.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the memo.

Another document, prepared by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Homeland Security Department, said that Mr. Obiang “routinely travels to the United States with over $1 million in cash” that he fails to declare, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Mr. Obiang regularly visits the country using a diplomatic passport, even though he rarely does diplomatic business here, said the I.C.E. document.

The document said the immigration agency’s goal is to deny a safe haven to Mr. Obiang and to “identify, trace, freeze and recover assets within the United States illicitly acquired through kleptocracy by Teodoro Obiang and his associates.”

The documents were originally obtained by Global Witness, a British human rights group that monitors corruption in natural resources industries, after they were released in response to a legal complaint filed in France against several African dictators, including President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. The Justice Department and I.C.E. would neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the documents.

Through a spokesman at Qorvis Communications, a public relations firm working for the Equatorial Guinean embassy in Washington, Teodoro Nguema Obiang declined to be interviewed. But his brother denied the charges of corruption.

“This is the problem when a country becomes very successful,” said Gabriel Mbega Obiang Lima, the vice minister of Mines, Energy and Industry and another of the president’s sons. “Everyone assumes us guilty until proven innocent.”

The vice minister said that his government had made great strides in dealing with corruption. He cited as an example his country’s participation in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, an international coalition of governments, civil society groups and companies that sets and enforces global standards for transparency in oil, gasoline and mining.

But a 2009 internal document from the initiative says that the organization is “particularly concerned about the pace of progress” in Equatorial Guinea. The country has failed to produce a required report regarding its revenue, even though it joined the organization more than three years ago, the report says.

In 2004, President Bush signed a proclamation barring entry to the United States for any foreign official “whose misappropriation of public funds,” including the taking of bribes, has had serious adverse effects on the activity of American businesses, or the nation’s security against international crime. Congress followed up in 2007 with a law containing even stronger language, barring admission to anyone believed by the secretary of state to be “involved in corruption relating to the extraction of natural resources in their countries.” Both restrictions also apply to the family members of corrupt officials.

Otto Reich, who served as the United States’ special envoy to the Western Hemisphere until he left the post in 2004, said that there was resistance to applying the presidential proclamation even before it was drafted.

“Senior State Department people especially from Africa kept saying that if something like this is used they wouldn’t have anyone to talk to in their home countries,” Mr. Reich said. “It’s politically simply something they do not want to take on.”

The Obiang family and Equatorial Guinea have been the focus of corruption accusations for years, a concern that helped lead to the 2007 law. In 2004, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused the Riggs Bank in Washington of having “turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption” in accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from Equatorial Guinea.

Committee investigators found dozens of irregular payments, multiple individual signatories to accounts and even deposits of millions of dollars in shrink-wrapped currency. Riggs Bank was fined more than $25 million for its handling of the Equatorial Guinean and other accounts, and several of the bank’s directors were criminally prosecuted.

But millions of dollars of the country’s money eventually found its way to other American banks, including the ones named in the Justice Department memo. Wachovia and Bank of America, according to the memo, filed suspicious activity reports to the authorities, and ultimately closed all accounts associated with Mr. Obiang and his associates, but not before tens of millions of dollars had already entered the United States.

“These banks appear to have facilitated a grand corruption, and it may even have been done legally,” said Gavin Hayman, director of campaigns for Global Witness. “Those that filed suspicious activity reports may have been complying with their regulatory obligations under the law, but at the same time they went ahead and forwarded transfers of tens of millions of dollars about which they already had suspicions. Effectively, the regulations are allowing banks to pollute the money supply.”

All three banks declined to answer questions about the transactions, although Wachovia said Mr. Obiang was not a client.

Since oil was discovered there in 1996, Equatorial Guinea has become the third-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola, with estimated revenues of $4.8 billion in 2007. But although petroleum has made the ruling Obiang family and its associates vastly rich, the oil and gas wealth has not been spread beyond ruling elites.

In 2006, more than three-quarters of the population was living below the poverty line, according to a 2009 International Monetary Fund report. On average, about 35 percent of the nation’s residents die before the age of 40, and 57 percent lack access to safe water, according to a 2009 United Nations report.

By some measures, conditions in the country are getting worse. Though the nation’s gross domestic product grew more than tenfold from 1990 to 2007, infant mortality rose from 10 to 12 percent, according to according to a 2009 UNICEF report.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Disgraceful. . . . .