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Africa Last Updated: Jun 16, 2009 - 12:10:29 PM


French Investigation into Omar Bongo's Assets Shut Down?
By Christopher Thompson, FIRST POST 15/6/09
Jun 16, 2009 - 12:08:37 PM

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The death last week of Omar Bongo, president of the oil-rich west African state of Gabon, has focused attention on why a French police investigation into the assets of the late dictator was shut down last year.

Bongo's French real estate holdings were so numerous and valuable that he was rumoured to be the country's biggest property owner. The investigation, launched in 2007, was intended to examine how Bongo and his family could possibly amass such a portfolio without embezzling state funds.

A list of the assets, made by French police before the investigation was abruptly halted by Paris's public prosecutor, has been seen by The First Post. It details 39 of the Bongo family's French properties - mostly in Paris's chic 16th arrondissement, including the apartment on Rue Laurent Pichat photographed above, plus several homes on the Cote d'Azur.

Among the choicest properties are an €18.8m apartment at 4 Rue de la Baume in Paris's 8th arrondissement and a package of properties on Boulevard Frederic Sterling in Nice, consisting of two apartments, three houses and a pool.

Bongo has been France’s most important ally in Africa since the De Gaulle eraThe police documents also list 70 separate accounts held by Bongo and members of his family at Barclays, BNP Paribas, HSBC and Societe Generale among other banks. One of the banks listed is Citibank on the Champs Elysee, which holds an account for the late president's cousin, Felix. Citibank was censured by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1999 for transferring more than $120m into one of Bongo's accounts without checking its provenance.

Also listed by the police are six luxury cars, available for family use in Paris and the Cote d'Azur, worth €1.29m. Documents show that one of the luxury cars in the Bongo garage, a €390,795 Mercedes-Maybach, was paid for directly from the bank account of the Gabonese national treasury. Ali Ben Bongo, Gabon's Defence Minister, who as The First Post reported last week is the presumed successor to the presidency, keeps a Ferrari 456 GTA, a Mercedes S-600 limousine and a Porsche 911 in France.

All of this detail might have been destined for oblivion but for the intervention of France's most senior investigating judge, Francoise Desset, who last month ordered that the police investigation be re-started.

Desset has agreed to reopen the case under pressure from William Bourdon, a campaigning Parisian lawyer acting on behalf of the anti-corruption non-governmental organisation Transparency International. TI is representing a Gabonese taxpayer and activist Gregory Mintsa, who accuses Bongo of embezzling public funds. If the case succeeds, it could establish a potentially explosive precedent in international law - allowing sitting presidents to be tried on corruption charges in third countries.

Daniel Lebegue, head of TI France, said: "This is the first time, anywhere in the world, that a judge has recognised the right of a non-governmental organisation to bring a lawsuit in the names of victims of corruption."

Judge Desset is not just investigating the Bongo family: he has also sanctioned a parallel investigation into the accumulation of French assets by Omar Bongo's father-in-law, Dennis Sassou-Nguesso, president of Congo-Brazzaville, another oil producing country firmly within the French sphere of influence.

Sassou-Nguesso's daughter Edith was Bongo's second wife until her death earlier this year. Investigators have identified 18 properties owned by Sassou-Nguesso in France, plus 112 bank accounts and at least one car bought for $224,492.

After more than 40 years as president of the hapless Gabonese people, Bongo finally died last Monday in a Barcelona clinic. This was denied back home in Gabon and then finally admitted by his prime minister.

Bongo's demise at the age of 73 had the air of a tragi-comic Shakespearean play. Officially, Africa's longest-serving leader died from a 'heart attack', having suffered from cancer, but some suggest foul play, citing the possibility that he was poisoned by ambitious palace plotters. Whatever the truth, his body was flown on Thursday from Spain to Gabon, for a period of lying-in-state before he is buried this week.

The death sent French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and his mandarins into a spin: Bongo has been France's most important ally in Africa since the De Gaulle era. The French army has a military base in the capital, Libreville, and French business giants such as Total and Bollore dominate Gabon's economy.

Most importantly, Bongo and his family have been donors-in-chief to the French political system for years, lavishing money on politicians from across the political spectrum. Giscard d'Estaing claimed this week on French radio that Bongo helped fund Jacques Chirac's bid for the French presidency in 1981.

"I learned that Bongo was financially supporting Jacques Chirac," said Giscard. "I called Bongo and told him 'You're supporting my rival's campaign' and there was a dead silence that I still remember to this day and then he said 'Ah, you know about it', which was extraordinary. >From that moment on, I broke off personal relations with him."

Chirac, questioned on Wednesday about Giscard's comments, dismissed the allegations as "totally unfounded". But if Chirac didn't get funding from Bongo, then he's one of the rare French politicians not to have received Gabonese cash.

The question now is whether Judge Desset's investigation will ever reach a conclusion. According to William Bourdon, there has been political pressure to shut it down from France's office of public prosecutors, which answers to the Ministry of Justice.

Says Bourdon: "It is the intention of Nicolas Sarkozy [that] this kind of enquiry will have no chance to move forward because [it's] considered against the political and economic interests of France in Africa. The appeal of the prosecutors is basically political because they're trying to put an end to an enquiry that threatens the Bongo and Sassou-Nguesso families."

As for Bongo's death, Bourdon insists it changes nothing. Much of the French property empire he amassed, including his son Ali Ben's apartment in a quiet road off the Avenue Foch, is held in the Bongo family name. 

Source:Ocnus.net 2009

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