One of the sons of the president of Equatorial Guinea, Ruslan Obiang Nsue, suspected of having sold a plane of the national airline, was arrested on Monday and placed under house arrest, announced Tuesday the state television (TVGE).
At the end of November, the authorities had opened an investigation “after noticing the disappearance of the ATR 72-500 aircraft belonging to the national Company”, Ceiba Intercontinental, which was since 2018 in routine overhaul in Spain, explains TVGE.
According to the same source, Mr. Obiang Nsue “sold the ATR aircraft to the company Binter Technic”, which specializes in aeronautical maintenance and is based in Las Palmas, on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria. Ruslan Obiang Nsue, former secretary of state for sports and youth, and current director of Ceiba Airport, was first deputy director of Ceiba Intercontinental and then its managing director.
“Ruslan Obiang has confessed that he was the person who sold Ceiba’s ATR, I will not allow myself to be carried away by familialism or favoritism, which is why I have ordered his immediate arrest and handing him over to justice,” his half-brother, Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, nicknamed “Teodorin”, said on Twitter.
Teodorin Obiang himself was definitively sentenced by the French justice at the end of July 2021 to three years in prison with a suspended sentence and 30 million euros in fines and the confiscation of his assets in France for having fraudulently built up a luxurious patrimony within the framework of the “ill-gotten gains” cases.
In July 2021, London also froze his financial assets in the U.K. and banned him from its territory following anti-corruption investigations. Malabo then closed its embassy in the country to protest the decision.
The arrest of Ruslan Obiang Nsue, one of the president’s sons, is unprecedented for a member of the presidential family of the small oil-rich central African state. Last December, news of the plane’s disappearance and its alleged sale by Mr. Obiang Nsue sparked national outrage.