Equatorial Guinea: President’s son arrested for selling aircraft belonging to national carrier

Ruslan Obiang Nsue, a son of Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo, has been placed under house arrest for the alleged sale of an airplane belonging to the country’s flagship airline Ceiba Intercontinental, reports say.

State television (TVGE) Tuesday reported that Obiang Nsue allegedly sold the jet, ATR 72-500, to the company Binter Technic, which specializes in aviation maintenance and is based in Las Palmas, on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria.

The aircraft, according to the TV, had been in routine maintenance in Spain since 2018. News of the disappearance of the aircraft surfaced in December causing national discomfort.

“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.

Obiang Nsue is the current director of Ceiba Airport but also happened to be the first deputy director of Ceiba Intercontinental and then its managing director.

Teodorin Obiang himself has been prosecuted in France and UK following anti-corruption investigations and ownership of fraudulent assets. The French justice in July 2021 sentenced him to three years in prison 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.

The UK justice in July in the same year also froze his financial assets there and banned him from its territory following anti-corruption investigations.

The African country rubbished the decision and closed its mission in the UK.