Word: bongo
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...investigation, carried out by a French magistrate responding to a lawsuit filed by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, has established that the Bongo family owns at least 33 luxury properties in France worth a total of $190 million, including a Paris villa bought in 2007 for $26 million and a Paris mansion bought the same year for a further $25 million. That last pile was officially bought by Bongo's two children, Omar Denis and Yacine Queenie, who were 13 and 16 at the time. The family, through Bongo, consistently denied corruption, although not that they owned the properties...
...This was not the first time Bongo had been exposed. In 1999, an investigation by the U.S. Senate into Citibank estimated that the Gabonese President held $130 million in the bank's personal accounts, money the Senate report said was "sourced in the public finances of Gabon." Earlier last decade, a French inquiry into the state-owned oil firm Elf-Aquitaine named Bongo as the beneficiary of millions of dollars in slush funds. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Bongo was far from the only postcolonial African head of state to take his country's riches as a personal reward for the burdens of office. The French-property portfolios of two others - Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea - are also under investigation, and the French have made inquiries into the assets of Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso. Like Bongo, all have denied any wrongdoing. But Bongo was one of the greediest and, coming to power at 31 in 1967, just seven years after Gabon...
...evaporated, and the majority of Gabonese survive on the margins in ramshackle slums. On a visit to the capital in 2007, I found a community of thousands living on a rubbish tip behind one hypermarket, feeding themselves on the food thrown out for being past its sell-by date. Bongo, meanwhile, could be seen overhead twice a day, flying the few kilometers in the presidential helicopter from his presidential mansion to his office, then back again in the evening. (Read "The Enrichment of Africa's French Allies...
...Bongo set the paradigm for Africa in other ways too. What money he did spend on Gabon went on white-elephant prestige construction projects - a raft of new government buildings and a $2 billion transnational railway - which, when oil prices dipped, were funded by debt that spiraled out of control and threatened to bankrupt the country. And in politics, Bongo fixed elections for himself and bought off political opposition with money or power - despite its small size, Gabon has more than 40 Cabinet Ministers - or worse. Several opposition members were killed in the 1970s. In 1990, the mysterious death...