The government of Equatorial Guinea said on Thursday it will file “criminal and civil suits” against foreign media for their allegedly “tendentious comments” on links between the country’s president and a scandal-plagued United States bank.
The government of the small, oil-rich Central African country plans particularly to sue Spanish television for a report concerning millions of dollars deposited into accounts at Riggs Bank controlled by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and his wife.
Viewed by satellite in the tropical former Spanish colony, the broadcast on Spain’s TVE television concerned a US congressional report on the close ties between the scandal-ridden bank and Equatorial Guinea’s ruling elite.
The Malabo government has “decided to file criminal and civil suits against the foreign press in general, and in particular the Spanish press and television, for tendentious comments and the manipulation of the truth, on the pretext of broadcasting” a report on the findings of a US Senate subcommittee, Minister of Information Alfonso Nsue Mokuy said.
“The inquiry by the subcommittee concerned the failure to observe banking regulations by the Riggs Bank,” said Nsue Mokuy, who is also government spokesperson.
He added that the government will also sue Riggs for “the harm done [to] leading people in the country”.
“Neither the government nor the authorities in the country are accused anywhere of corruption in the report,” he added. “Nobody says anywhere [in the report] that the state Treasury’s account with Riggs was manipulated by personal or private interests.”
In the July 15 report, the Senate subcommittee said that from “1995 to 2004, Riggs Bank administered more than 60 accounts for the government of Equatorial Guinea, EG government officials or their family members”.
“Over a three-year period, from 2000 to 2002, [the bank] facilitated nearly $13-million in cash deposits into Riggs accounts controlled by the EG president and his wife,” the report said. “The subcommittee has reasons to believe that at least one of these recipient companies is controlled in whole or in part by the EG president.”
According to the report by the permanent subcommittee on investigations, staff at Riggs, a venerable institution founded 165 years ago in Pennsylvania, “turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption”.
Overall, the subcommittee implicated the Washington-based bank in multimillion-dollar money-laundering scandals on behalf of Chilean former dictator Augusto Pinochet, Obiang and his family and aides, and Saudi Arabia.
People in Equatorial Guinea were given no media information about the report until it was widely seen when aired late last week by TVE, relayed to the country by satellite.
Such “defamation against the authorities of the country has the pretension of sullying its image and the honesty of its leaders”. — Sapa-AFP
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