Home > Mark Thatcher ’planned to relocate to Texas’
by FRED BRIDGLAND IN JOHANNESBURG AND KAREN MCVEIGH
MARK Thatcher was arrested by a crack South African police unit in connection with an African coup attempt because he was planning to quit his luxury Cape Town home and relocate to the United States next week, a senior detective said yesterday.
Thatcher, who is today under house arrest in his luxury home on the slopes of Table Mountain, had already sold his four vehicles, including two top-of-the range off-road vehicles, said Inspector Andrew Leask.
News of his planned departure emerged amid reports that a key witness in the investigation has disappeared. Jack Kershaw, a computer expert who is alleged to be the coup paymaster, appears to have gone to ground. His home and mobile telephones in South Africa are now registering unobtainable.
It was reported yesterday that Mr Kershaw, in his late 20s, is believed to be carrying the "wonga list" - the names and contact details of wealthy and powerful individuals who contributed funds to finance the alleged failed coup.
Insp Leask, a senior officer in the Scorpions, the police anti-corruption squad, said Thatcher’s activities had been monitored for more than a week before officers in plain clothes swooped on the house at 10 Dawn Street early on Wednesday. Thatcher, 51, who is charged with co-financing an elaborate coup attempt against Equatorial Guinea’s dictator president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, was arrested in his pyjamas and charged with part-bankrolling the coup attempt to the tune of some £300,000.
Insp Leask said the Scorpions had been planning to arrest Thatcher, who has lived with his wife and two children in Cape Town since 1995, later this year. But they were forced to act when he put his house up for sale at a minimum asking price of £2 million and made preparations to move to Texas. Investigators feared that if he left South Africa, it would take years to extradite him back.
Among many Thatcher possessions confiscated by the Scorpions were the air tickets on which he, his wife Diane Burgdof - a Texan heiress - and their two children, Michael,15, and Amanda,11, were to fly to the US next Monday. Thatcher had enrolled Michael and Amanda in American schools from the start of the new academic year in September.
Speaking on Channel 4 News last night, a family spokesman, Lord Bell, denied that Thatcher had been planning to flee South Africa. He said that Baroness Thatcher, the former prime minister, was "obviously distressed" over the arrest of her son but "very confident" that he would be cleared.
Thatcher has been ordered to pay £160,000 bail pending his reappearance in the Wynberg regional court on 25 November to face trial under South Africa’s new anti-mercenary legislation, the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act. Until the trial begins, Thatcher has to report daily to the police. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to 15 years in jail.
A former Scots Guard officer Simon Mann - a neighbour of the Thatchers in Cape Town - and 69 Angolan and South African mercenaries were arrested in Zimbabwe in March, allegedly en route to Equatorial Guinea to topple its ruler.
Last night one of the top lawyers in Equatorial Guinea said his country wanted to extradite Thatcher.
THE PRESSURES ON ’AFRICA’S KUWAIT’
EQUATORIAL Guinea, with a population smaller than that of Edinburgh, was until recently one of the poorest countries on earth. But now, following discoveries of vast offshore oil and gas fields, it has the world’s fastest growing economy.
Its oil wealth has made it strategically important almost overnight for Western nations. That wealth is also the honeypot that allegedly attracted British soldier of fortune Simon Mann and his collaborators in the plot to overthrow the country’s Presidential dictator, 62-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
Western intelligence agencies may well have endorsed the plot - in a plausibly deniable manner - to secure stability for Equatorial Guinea’s oil production and to rid the former Spanish colony of a notably brutal and avaricious ruling clan.
President Nguema ruled through terror in the pre-oil economic era. He has struggled to adapt in the post-oil era which began in the early 1990s. Production has reached 350,000 barrels a day, enriching Equatorial Guinea by some £500 million a month and earning it the title of the Kuwait of Africa.
The oil industry, and its very powerful corporate and political allies in the West, is far more demanding than Nguema’s oppressed populace has ever been. The riches are undermining the solidarity of Nguema’s ruling Mongomo clan, which dominates the armed forces and the presidential entourage, and has set off a fratricidal struggle for the succession.
Nguema is paranoid about coup plots, most of them from within his own extended family: like the one he staged himself in 1979 to overthrow his equally unsavoury uncle, Maçias Nguema, who was executed by his nephew’s Moroccan security guards.
This Moroccan elite has been known to execute by firing squad up 150 dissidents at a time in the national soccer stadium while a military band played "Those Were the Days, My Friend".
Dallas-based Triton Energy, which has close ties to President George Bush, Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco have together invested more than US$5billion in Equatorial Guinea’s burgeoning oil production, predicted soon to provide five percent of US oil needs.
After oil company lobbying, the US embassy in Malabo, Nguema’s capital, was reopened two years ago after being closed in the early 1990s when the ambassador received death threats.