Eight detained in Gabon anti-corruption crackdown
Reports say more than $142m has ‘evaporated’ over the past two years from the Gabon Oil Company due to corruption.
Oil-rich Gabon has detained eight people for theft and money-laundering as the government intensifies a crackdown on corruption, the prosecutor for the capital Libreville said on Thursday.
The revived anti-corruption drive has seen a string of top-level arrests in the central African country, as accusations that millions of euros have disappeared from state coffers swirl around top officials.
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“Eight people have been placed in preventive detention,” said prosecutor Andre Patrick Roponat, adding that they were accused of “siphoning off public funds and money-laundering.”
The group appeared before a judge on Wednesday along with eight others who were released on bail, Roponat said.
Pro-government newspaper L’Union reported this week that more than 85 billion CFA francs ($142m) have “evaporated” over the past two years from the funds of the Gabon Oil Company.
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The current investigations are a follow-up to Operation Mamba – an anti-corruption campaign launched in 2017 by President Ali Bongo, who has been battling serious illness.
The 60-year-old president said last month he was “fiercely determined” to push ahead with the campaign against corruption.
One high-profile political figure embroiled in the affair is Brice Laccruche Alihanga, Bongo’s former cabinet director who took the lead and spoke for the president after he suffered a stroke in 2018.
Laccuruche had held his cabinet post for more than two years but was dismissed on November 7 – at the start of a wave of arrests.
He has announced on social media that he would undertake a new mission for “the president and for Gabon”.
Earlier this week, lawyers told AFP news agency that presidential spokesman Ike Ngouoni and a dozen others were arrested and questioned over their ties to Alihanga.
During his months-long absence abroad for treatment, speculation over Bongo’s fitness surged and the army quashed a brief attempted coup.
Bongo has ruled Gabon since 2009, following the death of his father Omar Bongo, who was in power from 1967.