Leaked documents reveal the government awarded a Portuguese construction giant with ties to the vice president $1 billion in contracts as it splurged on a Paris-inspired capital, an empty airport, and other long-forgotten infrastructure projects.
The President Obiang Nguema International Airport lies outside the small town of Mongomeyen in the middle of the tropical rainforest of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny central African petrostate. A rudimentary roadblock of old oil barrels and planks, manned by a couple of ragtag police officers, leads to an empty parking lot facing the shiny new terminal. Inside, the lights are off and the check-in counters deserted. A bust of the country’s longtime dictator and former military officer, whom the airport is named after — Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo — looms over the empty waiting area, with the words “faith in my country, trust in my people.”
Several bored staff sit idly, chatting or staring at their cellphones. They told reporters that it had been months since the last flight.
The airport is one of numerous large infrastructure projects around the country that were built after the discovery of significant oil reserves in the 1990s, many of which are now languishing in the tropical sun.
Connected to the airport, deep in the country’s interior, is a network of four- and six-lane highways cutting across Equatorial Guinea in all directions. But in a country with a population of just over 1.6 million — roughly the size of Phoenix — these are largely deserted.
Vacant luxury hotels and golf resorts, gleaming but empty high-rises, ornate government buildings, and ubiquitous presidential palaces all testify to the promise of development after the oil boom — a promise that was unfulfilled.
The most ambitious government project is the new capital city, meant to replace the current capital of Malabo. Cut out of the dense forest not far from the president’s hometown, Ciudad de la Paz, or City of Peace, was designed for 200,000 people. Its infrastructure echoes the great public works of 19th-century Paris: imperious architecture, waterways and wide boulevards built along neat grids. The city was supposed to be inaugurated in 2020, but falling oil revenues halted its construction.
Leaked documents reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show that, before the money ran out, the Portuguese construction firm Zagope — a subsidiary of Brazilian construction giant Andrade Gutierrez — received a string of government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for projects in and around the future capital.
As Zagope gathered more and more state contracts, the leaked documents show, the firm in turn channeled millions of dollars to Somagui, a supposed forestry company belonging to the dictator’s eldest son, whose notoriety for corruption has been laid bare in cases in France and the U.S.
Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue — better known as Teodorin — serves as first vice president under his father and is heir apparent. He presides over the country’s anti-corruption commission, which was formed in 2022 to fulfil the obligations of an International Monetary Fund loan and, according to one analysis, has turned the commission into a tool for purging perceived rivals through “show trials.” The 56-year-old famously lives the life of a “playboy prince,” openly flaunting his penchant for private jets, supercars and yachts. His Instagram account is more pop star than politician, with videos of him in designer outfits or sipping cocktails at luxury beach resorts. He once allowed French TV to follow him on a shopping spree through Paris.
A South African legal battle revealed how in 2004 Teodorin bought two properties in Cape Town for about $8 million. A year later, on a shopping spree in the same city, he blew roughly $1.5 million on two Bentleys and a Lamborghini.
Between 2014 and 2018, according to the leaked documents, Zagope paid more than $86 million to Somagui — a company French prosecutors described as “an empty shell used solely to channel public money.”
The documents exposing the relationship between Zagope and the president’s son were obtained by the Expresso newspaper in Portugal and shared with ICIJ and media partners Le Monde, Diario Rombe and revista piauí.
The leak shows how Zagope for years fed off the government’s ill-fated plan to turn the rainforest of Equatorial Guinea into a new Dubai. At the height of the oil boom, Equatorial Guinea was the fastest-growing economy in the world, with a gross domestic product per capita on par with industrialized nations. But a golden opportunity to develop the country and improve people’s lives was discarded in favor of what one analyst told ICIJ was a “kleptocratic strategy” of building massive prestige projects.
Teodorin and the government of Equatorial Guinea did not respond to detailed questions.
Zagope did not respond to specific questions but said that it began operating “as a subcontractor” in Equatorial Guinea in 2008 “on a project that was already underway.”
The company said that in 2015, “due to changes in its corporate strategy,” it decided to “halt works and projects in countries where it felt it no longer had any interest in operating. One of these countries was Equatorial Guinea. However, there were still receivables in the country for services carried out during this period, and the company has since taken steps to collect these receivables.”
The company added that “since then, Andrade Gutierrez and its subsidiary Zagope have had no relationship with the government of Equatorial Guinea. In fact, they no longer have any operations in the country in question.”
The claim to have had no relationship with the government of Equatorial Guinea since 2015 is called into question by documents in the leak, including Zagope’s own annual reports and financial statements. Its 2020 annual report, for example, noted that the company had been involved in Equatorial Guinea since 2006 and “has developed projects described as vital for the development of the country, with a significant amount of contracts, which remain in execution.”
It also maintains a stranglehold on public institutions and elections. The ruling party won 94.9% of the vote in the last elections in 2022, with the European Union stating that it “deplores that the environment in which they were conducted was not conducive to democratic, pluralist and participatory elections.” The regime, says Equatorial Guinean human rights lawyer Tutu Alicante, has also ensured that “the opposition does not have any power whatsoever.”
“The political opposition in Equatorial Guinea is as weak as it gets when it comes to African countries,” Alicante told ICIJ. “Either they lock you up in jail … or they give you a lot of money and buy you off.”
Oil money, according to Alicante, only strengthened the state’s coercive capacity and patronage networks.
In the decades after independence, the country was one of the poorest in Africa — its stagnant economy reliant on cocoa, coffee and timber. The oil boom brought hope for improved material conditions and transformed Equatorial Guinea’s prospects for economic development as oil companies, mostly from the U.S., swarmed the tiny nation.
In Equatorial Guinea the political elite is a family, and they’re the economic elite too. — Ana Lúcia Sá, assistant professor of African Studies at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon
However, people’s hopes that oil would significantly improve their lives were soon dashed. Equatorial Guinea became a textbook example of the resource curse — the paradox of countries rich in oil and minerals having lower levels of development. The government failed to promote transparency in public finances and did little to diversify the economy.
“In Equatorial Guinea the political elite is a family, and they’re the economic elite too,” said Ana Lúcia Sá, assistant professor of African Studies at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. “Everybody needs [the ruling family] if they want to enter the country [to do business]. The family controls the most important ministries and portfolios, from security to resource-linked portfolios.”
Little of the newfound wealth trickled down, despite Equatorial Guinea becoming an upper-middle-income country overnight. Over 70% of the population remains trapped in poverty, living standards are low and the government has been criticized for underinvesting in education. Life expectancy hovers below the continental average — a feature of the country’s severe underspending on health care.
Instead, oil revenues that weren’t looted by the political elite were squandered on white elephants, like Ciudad de la Paz. The government’s ill-conceived infrastructure drive left lavish architectural projects littered across the country — many of them geared to the country’s tiny ruling class or standing idle and falling into disrepair.
The president’s hometown, Mongomo, is dominated by one such absurdity. The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — the second-largest religious building in Africa — is loosely modeled on the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica. The Swiss- and Italian-built church is large enough to accommodate a thousand parishioners under its massive dome but was deserted when ICIJ visited.
The government’s fixation with grand engineering works — at the expense of building schools, hospitals and housing — is part of what Alicante refers to as the “economic architecture created for taking money from the state.”
“Why build a basilica when you can build a church for a village,” he said. “Many of these infrastructure projects were conceived for the purposes of corruption, not for the purposes of serving people. And if I want to steal I am going to be able to steal more money if I am building a basilica that costs $10 million than if I am building a church that costs $2 million.”
Zagope’s bonanza
Zagope, which has operated in the Equatorial Guinean market since 2006 after the firm was acquired by the Andrade Gutierrez Group in the late 1980s, was hardly the only company cutting deals to the benefit of the ruling family. Its long involvement in Equatorial Guinea conforms to what analysts say is a pattern in which foreign companies doing business in the country have to ensure that the Obiangs benefit.
A 2004 U.S. Senate report found that American oil companies were paying Equatorial Guinean “officials, their family members, or entities controlled by these officials or family members” and were “[entering] into business ventures with companies owned in whole or in part by the E.G. President, other E.G. officials, or relatives.”
Teodorin’s own education at Pepperdine University in California was allegedly paid for by an American oil company.
Soon after it started operating in Equatorial Guinea, Zagope was subcontracted through a German company for a $65 million project to build the platform, runway and access road for the international airport outside the small town of Mongomeyen, a half-hour drive from the future capital.
In 2009 the company was given a street asphalting project worth $27 million in the town, according to the leaked documents.
From there, Zagope’s business with the government steadily piled up. In 2010, it bagged a big-ticket contract to construct a highway connecting the new capital and Mongomeyen to the town of Ebebiyin, on the border of Equatorial Guinea’s two neighbors, Gabon and Cameroon. That deal was worth $392 million.
Next was a contract for extensions to the Mongomeyen airport in 2011 worth about $112 million. A leaked document from December that year made it clear that the government would have to authorize any subcontracting arrangements.
Another document from the leak sheds light on Zagope’s windfall in a country that is effectively run as a family business — where the president and his family dominate every facet of political and economic life.
That document, dated March 10, 2012, is a subcontracting agreement concerning the “construction of an intersection linking a highway with the VIP area of Mongomeyen airport, as well as the highway that gives access to the airport.” Zagope, represented by its general manager in Equatorial Guinea, Manuel Saraiva, and head of finance, Sergio dos Santos Gomes, signed the document alongside Teodorin as the president of his forestry company Somagui. At the time, the president’s son was minister of agriculture and forestry.
The agreement stipulated that Somagui would undertake work worth $4.9 million or 32% of the value of the contract awarded to Zagope. This was a “back-to-back” arrangement. In other words, Somagui would get paid by Zagope only after the latter received its money from the state. The agreement also stated that “Zagope will make the necessary technicians available to Somagui so that, together with Somagui’s technicians, they can carry out the proper execution of these works.”
Zagope did not respond to a question about the legitimacy of the contract.
The airport contract would become effective once Zagope received its first “service order” of over $15 million from the government to carry out the work. That order came later in March. By mid-2012, a letter from Zagope to the vice minister of finance and budgets noted that the company had five projects underway, all related to Mongomeyen, the airport and the future capital.
Later that year, when the country marked its Independence Day on Oct. 12, Obiang senior presided over the inauguration of his eponymous airport outside Mongomeyen. The total cost was reportedly $375 million, all funded by the state.
Zagope later posted revenue of more than $719 million for 2012, defying Portugal’s protracted financial crisis and an international economic downturn that hit the construction industry hard. Zagope’s international reach, especially its involvement in Africa, was key to its success. A 2013 article quoted Saraiva, the general manager, as saying that Equatorial Guinea was “one of the essential pillars of our expansion in the continent.”
In November 2012, after the airport officially opened, Zagope struck another subcontracting deal with Teodorin’s Somagui. This time the agreement concerned additions to the airport: the “Construction of the maintenance hangar platform.” Somagui would receive roughly $2.5 million — a quarter of the contract value — for performing various roles, from demolition to laying foundations.
It is unclear whether Somagui performed the work specified in the March and November contracts in exchange for the large payments from Zagope to Somagui, which are mentioned in tax returns in the leaked data. According to a 2014 return, under a section detailing payments to third parties, Zagope paid Somagui more than $63 million for “earthmoving services.” The following year Zagope paid Teodorin’s company another $14.4 million, again for “earthmoving services.”
In that same year, 2015, Otavio Azevedo, the powerful CEO of Zagope’s Brazilian parent company Andrade Gutierrez, was arrested as part of the Lava Jato investigation — Brazil’s sweeping anti-corruption probe that uncovered massive wrongdoing involving state-owned enterprises, major private corporations and senior government officials. Andrade Gutierrez and the Odebrecht Group, Latin America’s biggest construction firm, were accused of paying corrupt officials in return for lucrative contracts from Brazilian state-owned oil company Petrobras. Azevedo admitted to a series of corruption offenses and received an 18-year prison sentence.
In a May 2016 statement, Andrade Gutierrez made an unprecedented public apology to “the Brazilian people.” The company promised it would learn from its mistakes and take corrective measures, and recommended eight ways to clean up public procurement and promote ethics and social responsibility. In 2018, Brazilian authorities said Andrade Gutierrez had agreed to a $381.5 million fine to settle corruption allegations. As part of the deal, the firm also agreed to testify in cases of alleged malfeasance involving hundreds of individuals and companies.
Despite its parent company’s apology, Zagope continued to make suspect payments to Somagui. The Portuguese company paid $8.3 million to Somagui in 2017 and an additional $72,500 in 2018, this time for unspecified “subcontracting.”
Despite dwindling oil revenues after the oil price crash of 2014, Zagope continued to reap a fortune from contracts potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build the new capital’s roads and city blocks.
The project to construct Ciudad de la Paz consumed half of the government’s budget in 2016, but the plummeting oil revenues ultimately deferred the grandiose dream. Construction eventually ground to a halt. Today, the half-built future capital is a ghost town of empty office towers and government buildings, and abandoned construction sites.
But Zagope had raked in a fortune by then. In total, the company was awarded nearly $1.2 billion worth of contracts by the Equatorial Guinean government between 2009 and 2012, according to the leaked documents; it passed on at least $86 million to Somagui between 2014 and 2018.
Zagope was entangled with the first family in other ways, too. The company made regular payments to a company called Abayak for rental property as late as 2022, invoices in the leak show. Abayak is owned by the president and is ubiquitous in the country. A U.S. Senate investigation found that the company held a 15% stake in a local subsidiary of American oil giant ExxonMobil in addition to a range of other interests on behalf of the president and his wife.
As Zagope was striking deals with Teodorin and funneling millions of dollars to his company, Somagui, his many controversies were coming to light through investigations in the U.S. and France, while journalists were increasingly looking into the sudden enrichment of the country’s political elite. None of this seemed to deter Zagope from entering into questionable deals with Somagui.
In 2004, a U.S. Senate report exposed the complicity of Riggs Bank, a respected bank based in Washington, D.C., in laundering money for high-profile individuals — moving large sums without asking questions about the source of the money and actively concealing funds from investigators. The report laid out how the bank helped former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet “evade legal proceedings seeking to discover and attach his bank accounts.”
The report also focused on Riggs Bank’s involvement with the government of Equatorial Guinea, government officials and their family members, on whose behalf the bank administered over 60 accounts. The country constituted the bank’s largest relationship, “with aggregate deposits ranging from $400 to $700 million at a time.”
Riggs Bank, according to the report, “serviced the E.G. accounts with little or no attention to the bank’s anti-money laundering obligations, turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption, and allowed numerous suspicious transactions to take place without notifying law enforcement.”
The bank opened an account for Equatorial Guinea to receive revenues from oil companies operating in the country, and permitted the president and his inner circle to dip into these funds at will. Withdrawals merely required the signature of the president, together with another of his sons, Gabriel Obiang Lima, or his nephew, the secretary of state for treasury and budget. In this way, Riggs allowed over $35 million to be transferred to the “personal bank accounts of a senior E.G. official,” “an offshore shell corporation owned by the wife of the E.G. account manager at Riggs” and to two companies “which were unknown to the bank and had accounts in jurisdictions with bank secrecy laws.”
In one dramatic account in the Senate report, a witness described suitcases full of cash being brought into the bank. The cash, according to the witness, was delivered by a bank employee who said he had obtained it from Equatorial Guinean officials, such as the president or the country’s ambassador to the U.S.
The report specifically mentioned Somagui as a company controlled by the president’s son, though it did not accuse it of wrongdoing.
In 2014, Teodorin reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to forfeit more than $30 million worth of assets in the U.S. allegedly derived from stolen funds. The U.S. alleged that Teodorin, whose government salary in 2011 was less than $100,000, had corruptly amassed over $300 million hidden in the U.S. and other countries.
Back in 2007, the year after Zagope entered the Equatorial Guinean market, anti-corruption associations had begun spearheading what would become a landmark case in France targeting allegedly kleptocratic elites in Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea.
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As part of what was known as the “Biens mal acquis” (ill-gotten goods) trials, prosecutors targeted Teodorin’s assets in France, zeroing in on the role of Somagui, which they claimed was “an empty shell used solely to channel public money.”
French investigators found that Somagui was used to pay for Teodorin’s infamous splurges, including a fleet of luxury vehicles and supercars, jewelry, art, designer clothes and bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the most expensive wines in the world — all proceeds of corruption.
Investigators found that Teodorin was the secret owner — through intermediary companies — of a residence worth about $135 million at the time with “ostentatious” fittings and decor in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris. From 2007 to 2011 transfers from Somagui were used to pay for the upkeep of the building.
In 1997, Teodorin, who was not yet 30 at the time, was appointed minister of agriculture and forestry by his father. It was a crucial portfolio, with timber the second most important industry after oil, and he held the post until 2012. As part of the Biens mal acquis case, a French court heard how, as minister, Teodorin instituted a “revolutionary tax,” allegedly forcing logging companies to pay him directly, “either in cash or through cheques made out to Somagui.”
Teodorin was also accused of selling off national reserve land to a company for private gain. The director of one logging company told investigators that Somagui “did not exist in reality” and that “false certificates had been drawn up to show that the company was building roads, which were never actually built.”
After Teodorin made an unsuccessful attempt to claim diplomatic immunity and avoid prosecution, in 2017 a French court gave him a three-year suspended sentence and a $35 million fine for embezzlement. His French assets, valued at over $178 million, were also seized.
This was all public information that Zagope would have known while it was paying the president’s son. One of Zagope’s own compliance documents, contained in the leak, lists a number of “major corruption cases in the world.” The first case listed is the 2014 U.S. Justice Department’s prosecution of Teodorin for money laundering and the seizure of his assets. The document also notes the seizure of 24 of his supercars by Swiss authorities and the 2017 ruling against him in France.
In 2018, Teodorin’s diplomatic troubles spilled into the open in Brazil, the home of Zagope’s parent company. At Viracopos airport in Campinas, near São Paolo, Brazilian authorities seized more than $16 million worth of cash and luxury watches from him and his entourage after a search of their private plane and a standoff that lasted several hours. The same day, Teodorin’s small fleet of high-end cars was rushed off from his apartment building’s garage in São Paulo to the Equatorial Guinean Embassy in Brasília, out of reach of Brazil’s authorities.
At the time, Teodorin was being investigated by Brazilian federal police in connection with the purchase of the apartment — part of what investigators determined was a broad money laundering operation originating from the corrupt schemes of the Obiang clan in Equatorial Guinea.
That investigation ultimately found that Teodorin bought the apartment in 2007 for more than $7.8 million and then over subsequent years sank over $17 million into upgrading it. A complex web of offshore accounts, lawyers and front companies — including Somagui — was used to obscure the illicit nature of the payments, according to an indictment seen by ICIJ.
In retaliation for the Brazilian police investigations, the Obiang government halted payments to Brazilian construction companies operating in Equatorial Guinea. Zagope and two Brazilian firms became collateral damage in the diplomatic fallout. Equatorial Guinean authorities seized the companies’ assets and, according to a source familiar with Zagope’s activity in the country, have refused to pay about $75 million still owed to it.
Zagope confirmed the sequestration of its assets in Equatorial Guinea “in retaliation for the Brazilian authorities’ operation against Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue (Teodorín) in Brazil.”
In June 2023, Teodorin posted on the social media platform X copies of two documents: one referring to a damages claim by the Obiang government against the government of Brazil, and another referring to a lawsuit by the Brazilian firms asking for payment of money owed to them. In the same post, Teodorin threatened the government of Brazil: “After five years of offering unfulfilled guarantees of a solution, the only thing the Brazilian government and the judiciary have managed to do is harm themselves. We hope that [Equatorial Guinea’s] decision will serve as a warning to help them understand the consequences of their actions in the future.”
The Brazilian investigation, concluded in July 2024, resulted in an indictment against Teodorin and three others: the interior designer of the Brazilian apartment and two of Teodorin’s lawyers. The case is ongoing.
Contributors: Micael Pereira (Expresso), Mocache Massoko (Diario Rombe), Allan de Abreu (revista piauí), Pierre Lepidi (Le Monde), Jesús Escudero and Delphine Reuter (ICIJ)
