On Oct. 27, a Paris criminal court convicted Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the vice president of Equatorial Guinea and son of its president, of money laundering and embezzlement of more than $100 million.
Mr. Obiang received a suspended three-year prison sentence and was fined $35 million. The judge ruled that the French government would keep more than $100 million of Mr. Obiang’s assets, seized by the police in Paris in 2012. They included a 100-room mansion and a collection of sports cars.
More than a decade earlier, CCFD-Terre Solidaire, a French nongovernmental organization, denounced Western companies and governments for enabling dictators by welcoming their ill-gotten wealth. That prompted the anticorruption groups Transparency International France and Sherpa to start legal proceedings against the presidents of Equatorial Guinea, the Republic of Congo and Gabon.
