The Court of Cassation dismissed the  appeal of Equatorial Guinea's Vice President Teodorin Obiang on Wednesday. And for good reason, he was definitively condemned in France for having fraudulently built up a luxurious patrimony in a part of the case of "ill-gotten gains".

" With this decision, the French court confirms that the France is no longer a land of welcome for money embezzled by senior foreign leaders and their entourage ," Patrick Lefas, president of the NGO in France, said in a statement. Teodorin Obiang, 52, was sentenced by the Paris Court of Appeal in February 2020 to three years in prison suspended, a fine of 30 million euros and the confiscation of all his seized assets for "laundering abuse of corporate assets, embezzlement of public funds and breach of trust" between 1997 and 2011. This is the first time that a foreign leader has been definitively convicted in France in a so-called "ill-gotten gains" case. Investigations into the "ill-gotten gains" of African leaders and their entourage had really started in 2010 on the basis of complaints from the NGOs Sherpa and Transparency International.

The shutters concerning the Bongo family in Gabon and the Sassou Nguesso family in Congo-Brazzaville are still under investigation, and other foreign dignitaries have since been targeted by similar proceedings. The court estimated at 150 million euros the sums laundered in France by Teodorin Obiang, son of the president of Equatorial Guinea. In particular, he acquired a mansion of nearly 3,000 m2 on Avenue Foch, in one of the most exclusive districts of Paris. Cinema, hammam, marble and gold taps: the building has been estimated at 107 million euros. With Teodorin Obiang definitively convicted, Equatorial Guinea becomes the first country to benefit from the new mechanism for the return of assets fraudulently acquired by foreign leaders, adopted by the French Parliament last week.