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Forget health and education... son of African despot splashes out £233m on a yacht By David Wilkes Last updated at 12:59 AM on 1st March 2011
Teodorin Obiang: Dictator's son splashes out on expensive cars, luxury houses and now a yacht
His yacht will cost nearly three times what his country spends on health and education for its impoverished citizens each year.
But Teodorin Obiang is the son of a dictator and the chances are that such considerations won’t unduly trouble him.
He has commissioned a $380million (£233million) superyacht, with cinema, restaurant, bar and swimming pool, it was revealed yesterday.
Because Obiang earns $6,799 (£4,184) a month as agriculture minister of the tiny, oil-rich West African state of Equatorial Guinea, questions are being asked about quite how he could afford the 390ft yacht.
If built, it will be one of the most expensive private vessels in the world. It is thought that Obiang used as a blueprint Roman Abramovich’s Pelorus – worth a mere £74million – as a blueprint.
The most expensive luxury yacht in the world is the Eclipse, also owned by Mr Abramovich and worth around £740million.
Gavin Hayman of corruption watchdog Global Witness renewed calls for sanctions against Obiang.
He said: ‘That a president’s son from such a poor country has ordered this yacht is outrageous extravagance.’
It was Global Witness which discovered that German company Kusch Yachts had been asked to build the vessel in a secret project codenamed Zen. The planned delivery date is 2012, but construction has not yet started.
Obiang, 41, is the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president Teodoro Obiang, who took power in a bloody 1979 coup and is reportedly grooming his son to succeed him.
The country is cited as a textbook case of the ‘resource curse’. Since the mid-1990s it has become one of sub-Sahara’s biggest oil producers and in 2004 was said to have the world’s fastest-growing economy.
But few have benefited from the riches and the country ranks near the bottom of the UN human development index. The UN says that less than half the population has access to clean drinking water and that 20 per cent of children die before reaching five.
Yesterday the Equatorial Guinea government confirmed the president’s son had ordered the design, but claimed he had ‘then dismissed the idea of buying it’. It said that if the order had gone ahead, it would have been bought with the proceeds of private business activities.
In 2007 a U.S. Justice Department report said: ‘It is suspected that a large portion of Teodorin Obiang’s assets have originated from extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct’.
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