25 LUXURY CARS SEIZED FROM EQUATORIAL GUINEA PRESIDENT'S SON AUCTIONED IN SWITZERLAND.

A Lamborghini Veneno roadster fetched $8.4 million on Sunday in Geneva.

Geneva, SWITZERLAND:

A fleet of supercars said to have been seized by the Swiss authorities in a money-laundering investigation involving the son of the leader of Equatorial Guinea was auctioned on Sunday in Switzerland.

The vehicles were among 25 luxury cars sold for more than $ 27 million at Bonhams auction house, according to The Associated Press, in what Bonhams called a “very special sale.” Beforehand, the cars had been estimated to bring in more than 12 million euros , or $ 13 million.

“The cars represent an international roll call of prestige and performance marques,” with models from Aston Martin, Bentley, Bugatti, Ferrari and Lamborghini, Bonhams said in a statement.

Many of the cars once belonged to Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, according to news reports, vice president of Equatorial Guinea and a son of its longtime leader.

Supercars from a collection owned by a son of Equatorial Guinea’s president were shown on Friday at an auction preview in the Swiss village of Cheserex.

Mr.Obiang led an opulent and charmed life for years, spending a good amount of his time in a 100-room mansion on Avenue Foch in Paris, ordering bottles of Romanée-Conti Burgundies and driving his supercars.

In 2007, two nongovernmental organizations and an association of Congolese citizens abroad filed a criminal complaint accusing three African heads of state - including Mr. Obiang’s father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the country’s president for the past four decades - of embezzling state money to buy properties in France illegally.

The authorities began seizing Mr. Obiang’s property in 2011, including,

The Times reported, 11 luxury cars like two Bugatti Veyrons, among the most powerful and expensive cars in the world; a Mercedes Maybach; an Aston Martin; a Ferrari Enzo; a Ferrari 599 GTO; a Rolls-Royce Phantom; and a Maserati MC12.

Officials later seized property like the contents of a wine cellar. And in 2016, the Swiss authorities confiscated more cars as part of a corruption investigation involving President Obiang and ordered the sequestration of a yacht. According to Le Monde, the Obiang art collection included a Degas and five works by Rodin.

The younger Mr. Obiang was convicted of money laundering and embezzlement of more than $ 100 million by a Paris court in 2017, but the case has been appealed. Geneva prosecutor’s office announced in February that it had closed its case against him.

The auction of his luxury car collection took place in a 12th-century abbey in the Bonmont Golf and Country Club in Geneva.

It featured scarcely seen models, including a white and cream Lamborghini Veneno, one of nine roadsters created to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. It was expected to go for at least $ 5.5 million but brought in $ 8.4 million, including fees.

Also on the block were a Koenigsegg One: 1, one of only six models promoted as the world’s “first mega car,” partly because of its ability to produce more than one megawatt of power; and a barely used La Ferrari, described by its manufacturer as the “most ambitious” Ferrari. It had been driven just 621 miles.

The State of Geneva offered the collection for sale, to be sold without reserve, Bonhams said in a statement. The proceeds were expected to be donated to a charity in Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich but impoverished West African country.

Comments

CUBA CLAIMS CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS FIDEL CASTRO'S SON.

The suicide note left by Fidel Castro’s eldest son has rocked the Cuban nation this week, with the most astonishing revelation being the claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was his half-brother and the son of the late Fidel Castro. The handwritten note left by Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the eldest of Fidel Castro’s children, appears to confirm the longstanding rumor in Cuba that Fidel Castro fathered Justin Trudeau after a public tryst with Margaret Trudeau in 1970. “ Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning ,” Cubadebate website reported. The death of the high-profile government nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, stunned the nation, however it is his “ explosive ” suicide note that has set tongues wagging in Havana. Amid a wide-ranging barrage of compl...

WHY CHINA'S DOG-MEAT MARKET HAS EXPANDED.

Every year during the summer solstice, a dog-eating festival takes place in Yulin, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi. This year’s event ended with the usual controversy. Photographs of dogs being fried or treated cruelly went viral. The Jinhua Hutou Dog Meat Festival, as it is called, was abruptly canceled last week. Animal-rights activists and American congressmen demanded that China ban the eating of dogs and cats, as Taiwan did in April. Yulin’s local government took modest steps to restrain or hide some of the more contentious activities, such as selling dogs in food markets. Still, the festival was packed. Why has the controversial culinary habit become so popular in China? Contrary to cliché, dog meat has not always been a common item in the Chinese diet. Unlike in the West, eating dogs has never been taboo, but it appears to have been rare in the past. Government accounts single out butchers who sold dog meat, suggesting it ...

UGANDA ANNOUNCES "KILL THE GAYS" LAW IMPOSING DEATH PENALTY TO HOMOSEXUALS.

Kampala, UGANDA: Uganda has announced plans to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. The bill, colloquially known as “Kill the Gays” in Uganda, was nullified five years ago on a technicality, but the government said on Thursday it plans to resurrect it within weeks. The government said the legislation would curb a rise in “unnatural sex” in the east African nation. “Homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans, but there has been a massive recruitment by gay people in schools, and especially among the youth, where they are promoting the falsehood that people are born like that,” the country’s ethics and integrity minister, Simon Lokodo, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Our current penal law is limited. It only criminalises the act. We want it made clear that anyone who is even involved in promotion and recruitment has to be criminalised. Those that do grave acts will be given the death sentence.” Mr Lokodo said the bill, which has the support of th...

MALARIA VACCINE PROVES HIGHLY EFFECTIVE IN BURKINA FASO.

A vaccine against malaria has been shown to be highly effective in trials in Africa, holding out the real possibility of slashing the death toll of a disease that kills 400,000 mostly small children every year. The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months. The hunt for a malaria vaccine has been going on the best part of a century. One, the Mosquirix vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, has been through lengthy clinical trials but is only partially effective, preventing 39% of malaria cases and 29% of severe malaria cases among small children in Africa over four years. It is being piloted by the World Health Organization in parts of Kenya, Ghana and Malawi. The Oxford vaccine is the first to meet the WHO goal of 75% efficacy against the mosquito-borne parasite disease. Larger trials are now beginning, involving 4,800 children in four countries. Prof ...

MINERS IN NAMIBIA DISCOVER SHIPWRECK LOADED $13 MILLION WORTH OF GOLD.

Image: Dieter Noli. Diamond miners working off the coast of Africa were beyond surprised when they discovered a 500-year-old shipwreck teeming with gold worth $13 million and other treasures. The ship, aptly named ‘Bom Jesus’ or ‘Good Jesus,’ was like a miracle to the miners. Bom Jesus was first identified and discovered by geologists working for the mining company De Beers in 2008. It was found off the coast of Namibia near Oranjemund. Image: Dieter Noli. According to experts, Bom Jesus is from the Golden era of Portuguese explorers who set sail in all directions in search of new lands to colonize. The ship left Lisbon in 1533 under the supervision of Sir Francisco de Noronha. But on its way to India, it mysteriously vanished. Before the discovery, the miners were draining an artificial salt lake. As the lake dried out, many lost ships were found at the bottom of the lake. Bom Jesus was among them, and it is considered the oldest of all ...

POPE TOLD BY ARMY CHIEF: "THERE IS NO RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION IN MYANMAR."

Myanmar’s powerful army chief has told Pope Francis there is “no religious discrimination” in the country during talks at the start of the pontiff’s delicate visit to the majority-Buddhist nation that has been accused of “ethnic cleansing” against its Muslim Rohingya people. Min Aung Hlaing. Reuters Thousands of Catholics welcomed Pope Francis to the country’s capital, Naypyidaw, where he arrived for a three-day visit to Myanmar on Monday. The trip – fraught with sensitivity and trepidation over how he will deal with the plight of the Muslim Rohingya – could be the trickiest yet of his papacy. The army chief told the pope that “Myanmar has no religious discrimination at all. Likewise our military too ... performs for the peace and stability of the country,” according to a Facebook post published by the general’s office a few hours after the meeting. There is also “no discrimination between ethnic groups in Myanmar”, he added. The Vatican said the m...

BOTSWANA SHUTDOWNS PROPHET BUSHIRI CHURCHES.

Gaborone, BOTSWANA: It never rains, but it pours for flamboyant prophet Shepherd Bushiri’s Enlightened Christian Gathering church in Botswana, as government closes down all of his church branches following the deregistration of the organisation last year. As a result, disciples of Bushiri’s in Botswana have resorted to following their leader through his television channel, while those who have the means are travelling to South Africa on weekends to attend Sunday services. The recent crackdown on the church comes just a few weeks after the government of Botswana lifted a visa travelling ban imposed on Bushiri during former president Ian Khama’s presidency. Unlike other Malawian citizens, Bushiri, who is also known as Major 1, was forced to apply for a visa each time he entered Botswana in 2017. The then nationality, immigration and gender affairs minister Edwin Batshu told MPs that Bushiri was “too demanding”. Batshu indicated that the government slapped Bushiri wi...

EGYPTIAN VILLAGE WHERE MOSQUE WAS BOMBED HAD BEEN WARNED.

CAIRO (AP) : Elders of a village in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where militants killed 305 people in a mosque had been warned by Islamic State operatives to stop collaborating with security forces and to suspend rituals associated with Islam’s mystical Sufi movement, security officials and residents said. The latest warning came as recently as a week ago, telling villagers in Al-Rawdah not to hold Sufi rituals on Nov. 29-30 to commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, according to residents and the officials who work for security and military intelligence agencies operating in Sinai. Local operatives of the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Sinai consider Sufis to be heretics who should be killed. Ahmed Saqr, an expert on the Sinai insurgency, said militants had publicly identified the mosque, which also serves as a Sufi center, as a target months ago. He wrote on Saturday in a Facebook post that the selection of the Al-Rawdah mosque as a target “raises questions about tho...

THOUSANDS OF FAKE COVID-19 VACCINES HAVE BEEN SEIZED IN SOUTH AFRICA & CHINA.

File photo - Interpol Secretary-General Jurgen Stock Image: africanews. Lyon, FRANCE: Police have seized thousands of counterfeit coronavirus vaccines in South Africa and China and have made more than 80 arrests after a criminal network selling fake jabs was uncovered, Interpol said on Wednesday. In South Africa, police officers found 400 ampoules of fake vaccines, equivalent to around 2,400 doses, at a warehouse just outside Johannesburg. A large quantity of fake 3M masks was also found and police arrested three Chinese nationals and a Zambian national. Police in South Africa seized hundreds of fake COVID-19 vaccines and made several arrests following a global alert issued by INTERPOL. In China, police successfully identified a network selling counterfeit COVID-19 vaccines, raided the manufacturing premises, resulting in the arrest of some 80 suspects, and seized more than 3,000 fake vaccines on the scene. The investigation was supported and coordinated by Interpol’s Illicit Goods ...

A MODEL SOLD HER VIRGINITY FOR $3 MILLION TO THE ARABIAN BILLIONAIRE.

A model claims she has auctioned her virginity for nearly $3million (£2.2million) - and says it is a 'dream come true' for her. Giselle, 19, who is based in the US, says she decided to sell her virginity through the notorious German-based website Cinderella Escorts. The agency claims the highest bidder was a businessman from Abu Dhabi, with a bid of 2.5m Euros ($2.9m/£2.2m), while a Hollywood actor was said to have made the second highest bid of 2.4m Euros ($2.8m/£2.1m). Giselle says she will use the money to pay for her college fees, buy a new house, and go traveling around the world. Watch the Video below: The model said: 'I am happy to have decided to sell my virginity through Cinderella Escorts. 'I would never have dreamt that the bid would rise so high and we would have reached 2.5million Euros. This is a dream come true.' Giselle said she was 'shocked' by the outrage against women selling her virginity, describing it as...

Kioo17 Journal

Search This Blog