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09/03/2004:

"An African Foul-Up, With an Intriguing Cast of Britons"

by Michael Wines
JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 2 - They say the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Alas, the same appears not to be true of coups in Equatorial Guinea.

A week ago, South African prosecutors tied the patrician son of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, to an improbable, botched coup in Equatorial Guinea, a minuscule, humid, African dictatorship. Now others in England's political and boarding-school elite are being dragged, over furious denials, into what is becoming a black eye for the British, whose colonialist image in Africa has been waning.

The would-be coup's ever more byzantine story, redolent of greed, stupidity, code names like Smelly and Scratcher, and "a large splodge of wonga" - apparently an Etonism for money - is providing a field day for South Africa's splashy press and its British mentors.

Full Article: New York Times

...Locked in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, facing years there or extradition to a potential death sentence in Malabo, Mr. Mann smuggled a plea to his wife. "Our situation is not good and very URGENT," it stated. "We need heavy influence of the sort that ... Smelly, Scratcher ... David Hart, and it needs to be used heavily and now.

"It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga! Of course, investors did not think this would happen. Did I?"

The note, with its tantalizing reference to "investors," reached the Scorpions, who concluded that "Smelly" was Mr. Calil and that "Scratcher" was Sir Mark, a neighbor of Mr. Mann in Cape Town. Yet, for all its innuendo, the note could be read as a cry by Mr. Mann for rich friends to rescue him.

Not so a second note. Known as the "wonga list," this one was reportedly prepared by Mr. Mann's accountant, a 24-year-old former Congo diamond-mine bookkeeper. It supposedly records the names of some 15 investors in the coup, and the sum each pledged to the operation. The Scorpions refuse comment on its existence.

Who heads the wonga list? The Independent, a London newspaper, reports that it includes one J. H. Archer, who placed $135,000 into Mr. Mann's bank account on March 3, three days before the coup plot collapsed. Lord Archer has denied through a spokesman that he has ever met Mr. Mann or that he knew of any coup, but has not explicitly refuted the money transfer, The Independent reported.

Mark Thatcher, whom the Scorpions say has cooperated with their inquiry, is also reported to be on the list. Through lawyers and spokesmen, the thrust of his defense is clear: he invested $250,000 in an air-ambulance venture run by Mr. Mann and another Thatcher friend, Crause Steyl, and nothing more.

"They did have a business dealing'' said Mr. Hodes, Sir Mark's trial lawyer. "It had to do with a helicopter." He added that the contract "has been made available to the local gendarmes." If Mr. Mann and Mr. Steyl flew the company into wrongdoing, Sir Mark's defenders say, it was without his knowledge. Mr. Steyl, a former mercenary pilot, is accused of doing just that, flying Mr. Moto, the exiled opposition leader, to Bamako, Mali, in March as the coup began to unfold. When the Zimbabwe police seized the mercenaries' jet in Harare on March 6, Mr. Steyl's brother Neil was at the controls.

Sir Mark, who inherited his father's baronetcy in 2003, has led a checkered life. In the mid-1980's, his dealings in arms and construction contracts led British critics to accuse him of trading on his family's political influence. He moved to the United States, only to be dogged by American tax investigators over a failed security company, and took his family to South Africa in 1995.

His latest brush with trouble, a coup that melds Bertie Wooster and "Scoop" in equal doses of farce and incredulity, has earned him no sympathy in the British or South African press. But if ever he needed it, it is now. Last week, Equatorial Guinea said it would seek an international arrest warrant so that he could face trial _ and, on conviction, a stay in Black Beach Prison.