The explosive new report by the Senate investigations subcommittee out today, which I covered here, is filled with lurid, juicy details about four previously unreported money-laundering cases in the US and the Americans who aided that laundering. For instance, Teodoro Obiang, son of Equatorial Guinea’s despotic president, used US attorneys and realtors to help him create shell corporations for his money—and in return, he feted them with VIP access to exclusive parties and other perks; in one email, an attorney who helped Obiang funnel money into the US, and who later got into a Playboy Mansion Halloween party thanks to Obiang, writes, “I met many beautiful women, and I have the photos, e-mail addresses and phone numbers to prove it.”
Another eye-catching detail that appears is the appearance of Obiang’s then-girlfriend, hip-hop starlet Eve Jeffers. (The two are no longer together.) Now, the relationship between Eve and Obaing had been reported long before the subcommittee’s report came out Eve Teodoro Obiang. However, today’s report does shed light on an unreported twist in their relationship: Eve was actually named president and CFO of one of Obiang’s shell corporations, named Sweet Pink Inc., according to George Nagler, the attorney who created the corporation for Obiang. Eve was also a signatory for an account at Union Bank of California for the Sweet Pink corporation, the report found.
This was a shady arrangement to say the least. Indeed, soon after the Union Bank account was created that listed Eve as a signatory, two wire transfers of about $30,000 from one of Obiang’s companies in Equatorial Guinea were deposited in the account. That raised red flags for Union Bank, which had listed Equatorial Guinea as a “high-risk jurisdiction,” and the bank quickly examined the accounts and later closed them, less than a month after they were opened.
The report doesn’t mention Eve outside the Obiang incident, but it goes to show that the ways in which foreign figures will launder money in the US are many, utilizing anyone from well-connected lobbyists and attorneys to even well-known music stars.
