Equatorial Guinea's demands for SA pair's release

Two SA oil engineers who have been imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea for 17 months won’t be released until SA returns two Cape Town houses which a court ordered to be seized from Equatorial Guinea’s Vice-President last year. That, notes the Daily Maverick, was the blunt message that Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo delivered to the then SA International Relations & Co-operation Minister, Naledi Pandor, in May. The houses in Bishopscourt and Clifton, which were owned by Equatorial Guinea’s Vice-President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mangue, are worth tens of millions of rands though they are steadily falling into disrepair. Frik Potgieter, a South African, and Peter Huxham, a dual SA-British national, were working in Equatorial Guinea when they were arrested on 9 February 2023 on what they and the UN have said were trumped-up charges of drug trafficking. In June 2023, they were convicted and each sentenced to 12 years in prison as well as receiving large fines. Their families are convinced that the real reason for the country’s action against them was that just two days before their arrests, a SA court had ordered the seizure of a luxury superyacht belonging to Vice-President Obiang. Earlier, a court had ordered the seizure of Obiang’s two luxury Cape Town villas. The yacht was later released, but the two houses remain attached.

The court ordered the seizure of the properties so they could be liquidated to realise money to pay damages which a court awarded to another South African, Daniel van Rensburg, who was imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea in 2011 after a joint airline venture with a member of the Obiang family went sour. The DM report notes Van Rensburg spent almost 500 days in the notoriously harsh Black Beach Prison. He claimed and won almost R40m in damages from Vice-President Obiang. The SA Government has taken up the case of Potgieter and Huxham with the Equatorial Guinea Government, but so far to no avail.