[imagesource: Instagram / @teddynguema]

Cape Town’s high court has cracked down on the vice president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, seizing two homes and a superyacht that belonged to him.

This is all following the unlawful and traumatic arrest of a South African businessman Daniel Janse van Rensburg, who was sent to the central African country’s notorious Black Beach prison in 2013.

Daniel filed a lawsuit against ‘Teddie’ – the playboy son of the iron-fisted EQ President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo – for being unlawfully detained and tortured for 491 days in what is widely known as Africa’s most dangerous prison.

According to the Citizen, the high court ordered the seizure of Teddies’s two properties – one suspected to be unfrequented in Clifton – along with his superyacht that was docked in Cape Town:

“We attached (seized) two houses…in Cape Town in a formal application two weeks ago and the superyacht last Tuesday,” lawyer Errol Eldson, told AFP. An application to auction the assets has been filed.

In 2021, the high court ordered Teddie to pay Daniel around R40 million ($2,2 million) in damages for being illegally imprisoned after a business deal with the VP went sour in 2013, his lawyer told AFP:

The lawyer said his client had been hired by an Equatorial Guinea politician, Gabriel Angabi, “to set up an airline” in the oil-rich but impoverished country. After nearly two years of setting up the airline and “everything in place and aircrafts were ready to start flying”, the businessman was called by Angabi for what he assumed would be the airline launch, according to Eldson.

“When he got there, Angabi said ‘we don’t want to do this anymore, we want our money back’,” said the lawyer.

That’s when everything went totally wrong as Daniel was unable to pay back all the money he had spent on the expensive project:

“He picked up the phone to vice president Obiang and within 10 minutes the rapid force intervention was there… they picked Daniel up and threw him into Black Beach prison”.

In his memoir published in September, Janse Van Rensburg wrote “what was supposed to be a short business trip to Equatorial Guinea turned into a journey to the depths of hell.”

You can check out Daniel’s full story in his memoir Black Beach: 491 Days in One of Africa’s Most Brutal Prisons.

Local YouTuber Joshua Rubin also detailed how the rife corruption in the dictatorial state led to the arrest of Daniel, interviewing him too for a first-hand account of his journey into the “depths of hell”:

Teddie’s 80-year-old father is the longest-serving president in Equatorial Guinea, surviving corruption charges and suppressing dissent and many attempted coups.

Teddie will be his successor despite being at the centre of numerous scandals all over the world because of assets suspected to have been illegally acquired.

France, Britain, and the US have all ordered him to forfeit millions of dollars in assets, from mansions to luxury cars, which he still unashamedly shows off on his Instagram:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Teodoro Nguema (@teddynguema)

The furniture from Teddie’s two residences in Cape Town’s affluent suburbs has already apparently been auctioned off.

May Daniel get his money and never have to think about Teddie again.

[source:citizen]