“It is one thing to say someone has a lot of money and is a corrupt leader; it is another thing to prove that money resulted from the corruption,” said Calvery, a criminal division veteran who first gained fame as an All-American basketball star at George Washington University.
On the investigative side, the kleptocracy lawyers have access to one full-time staffer and about 10 investigators on the Department of Homeland Security’s eight-year-old foreign corrupt investigations group based in Miami, said John F. Tobon, chief of the illicit finance and proceeds-of-crime unit.
The workload is increasing.
Investigators are working about 80 foreign and domestic cases involving kleptocracy, Tobon said.
The new kleptocracy initiative “certainly helped our efforts,” Tobon said of the Obiang case, which began after the Senate subcommittee issued its Riggs Bank findings in 2004. (Riggs was acquired by PNC Financial in 2005.)
“These cases are not easy,” Tobin said. “There are diplomatic issues, legal issues and some are very complex. You need not just a dedicated prosecutor but the experience they gain from prosecuting one case to the next.”
Many investigations cannot get off the ground without a request for “mutual legal assistance” from the country where the graft originally occurred, said Emil van der Does de Willebois, senior financial specialist for the Stolen Foreign Asset Recovery initiative of the World Bank and the United Nations. In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, for example, the countries began searching for stolen assets only after the fall of their longtime leaders. For Equatorial Guinea, the investigation began in the United States, since Obiang has remained in power after more than three decades.
“For a country that has never dealt with this issue before to suddenly start building that investigative capacity from scratch, to start the whole mutual legal assistance process from hardly ever doing that before, and then the unbelievable political pressure to get other things settled, it is quite incredible,” Van der Does de Willebois said.
The Justice Department will seek to forfeit and recover stolen funds for the benefit of the people of the country from which it was taken — but it is unlikely to return the money to Equatorial Guinea until Obiang leaves power and a democratically elected leader takes office.
In a previous case regarding the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Justice Department gave the money to a respected nongovernmental organization to administer the funds in a way that benefited Kazakhstan’s citizens.
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