The inheritance of the estate of Omar Bongo, who died in 2009 after ruling Gabon for 42 years, has shone a light on part of the staggering hidden wealth accumulated by the dictator and which is now the subject of bitter infighting among his 53 heirs.
Confidential minutes previously obtained by Mediapart of a secret meeting between the heirs in the Gabonese capital Libreville on February 17th 2014 revealed partial detail of the immense property ownership, offshore accounts and shares listed in the estate and which total 460 million euros, a sum which represents more than 10% of the Gabonese public budget for 2015.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The sole legatees are Gabonese President Ali Bongo, who succeeded his father as leader of the West African state, and Ali’s sister Pascaline. Mediapart has now obtained access to further confidential documents which reveal how the pair have major stakes in a holding company, Delta Synergie, set up under their father and which offers a staggering illustration of the rampant corruption that has and continues to bleed the former French colony’s economy.
Not one branch of the Gabonese economy is left untouched by the system built behind Delta Synergie: these include the insurance, banking and property sectors, the agroalimentary and construction industries, security, transport and medical sectors, agriculture and raw materials, gas and oil production, wood, business aviation, and the media. In all, there are 35 major companies in which Delta Synergie holds, to various degrees, a stake of capital.
Up until his death in a Spanish hospital on June 9th 2009, Omar Bongo held 37% of Delta Synergie’s capital - representing 114,700 shares - according to two documents relative to the estate of the late dictator, dated June 10th and October 1st 2014. Of these, his son Ali, and Ali’s sister Pascaline (who served as a close presidential aide to Omar), were each secretly handed 10% of Delta Synergie’s capital each, while six other family members were given a share of the rest.
In September 2009, and with the fervent support of then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Ali Bongo succeeded his father as president after a contested election that was marred by fraud allegations. Subsequently, Ali’s inheritance from Omar Bongo’s estate saw his stake in Delta Synergie climb to 19.25%, as was also the case for his sister Pascaline.
Thus, the Gabonese president and his sister are the principle beneficiaries of the holding company which is spread like a spider’s web across the country’s economy.
The sector of activity in which Delta Synergie is most present is raw materials and mining. It has a 30% stake in Gabon Mining Logistics, a subsidiary of France’s Bolloré group which provides logistical support to the local mining industry. It also has 29.1% of shares in Ragasel, a salt refinery business, in which the current Gabonese sports minister, Blaise Louembé, has a 1.7% stake.
Delta Synergie owns 39.2% of the capital of Ank Gabon, a company which is specialized in the production of cassava-based products. When Omar Bongo opened an Ank Gabon production plant in 2008, the presidential office issued a statement in which it said the event was the illustration of “the permanent concern to ensure an alimentary self-sufficiency in our country”. But it also ensured the “self-sufficiency” of the Bongo clan’s finances. One of President Ali Bongo’s advisors, Jean-Pierre Lemboumba, a former Gabonese finance minister who was nick-named “the safe-box”, holds a 10.05% stake in Ank Gabon.
Delta Synergie has stakes in investment consortium SOMIPAR (28.5%), petroleum marketing company Petro Gabon Holding (17%), the quarry site Les Carrières de Makora (13.04 %), and the Maboumine quarry (5 %) which manages a vast polymetallic ore deposit south-east of Libreville, wood company Somivab (2.68%), and Comilog (0.03%), the world’s second-largest manganese producer and a subsidiary of French mining and metallurgic company Eramet.
A country descending into a deep social crisis
The second largest sector of investment for Delta Synergie is that of banks and financial institutions. It has a 6.4% share of the capital of BGFI Holding, the biggest bank in Gabon, a 10% stake in the BGFI Bank Congo, a 7.5% stake in Ecobank Gabon, a 6.25% stake in consumer credit company Finatra, a 5.21% stake in banking group Union Gabonaise de Banque (UGB), and a 3.23% stake in the Banque Internationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie du Gabon (BICIG), a subsidiary of French bank BNP Paribas.
Delta Synergie also has 15% of shares in the Compagnie du Komo, itself a holding company which, on its website, describes itself as involved in “the management and administration of its affiliates engaged in activities as diverse as trade, industry, service provision, real estate and finance”. The Compagnie du Komo is a shareholder of the Gabonese energy and water supply company the Société d'Energie et d'Eau du Gabon, a subsidiary of French utilities giant Veolia which since 1997 holds a total monopoly on the supply of water and electricity in Gabon.
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Delta Synergie owns 60.69% of the capital of Gabon’s largest insurance company, the Ogar group, as well as shares in two other local insurance companies, Solicar (55%) and Assinco (7.5%).
In the transport sector, it holds 54% of the capital of maritime transport company Sarep, a 34.99% stake in business aviation firm SN2AG, and a 20% share of the capital of freight company Gabon Fret.
In the construction industry, Delta Synergie holds 50% of shares in Socoba, the leading construction firm for public sector building projects and which is run by a son-in-law of the late Omar Bongo. Delta also has a 4.45% stake of ETDE/SOGEC, a subsidiary of French construction giant Bouygues.
Delta owns 35% of Gabon’s biggest property management and transaction firm, IMP, and a 20% stake in another, AICI. It also has a 34.7% stake in textile company MGV, which has a monopoly as the supplier of all uniforms in Gabon, from the medical sector to the military. Delta owns 60% of Gabonese pharmaceutical firm SOGAFAM (Société gabonaise de fabrication de médicaments).
Delta Synergie is present in the security business, owning 69.3% of the Société Gabonaise de Sécurité (SGS), Gabon’s leading private protection and security firm which operates in the country’s airports and maritime ports and for foreign embassies. Created in 1975, SGS, in which the family of Gabonese defence minister Ernest Mpouho Epigat has a 9.2% stake, has been run over separate periods by two ranking French army officers, the late colonel Edouard de Béthencourt and his successor general Camille Megel.
After Omar Bongo’s death, Delta Synergie was officially estimated to be worth 27.8 billion CFA francs (a West African currency), equivalent to 42 million euros. Several of Omar Bongo’s 53 heirs complained that this was an underestimation given the extent of the holding company’s grip on the Gabonese economy. Mediapart has been told that a number of them, after learning only recently of the company’s reach, have hired lawyers in France and the US in an effort to track down the vast profits made by Delta Synergie since 2009, and are threatening legal action for suspected fraud.
The inheritance of Omar Bongo’s estate represents a timebomb, not least for the infighting Bongo clan. According to a document drawn up by the tax office of the Gabonese economy ministry and obtained by Mediapart, Ali Bongo and his sister, as sole legatees, are to share more than 183 billion CFA francs, equivalent to 280 million euros.
Mediapart’s revelations about the estate of Omar Bongo have caused controversy in Gabon and the issue is above all a major political problem for Ali Bongo, coinciding with one of the country’s worst-ever social crises. Amid the falling price of oil, which accounts for about 60% of state revenue, the country has been blocked by strikes in both the private and public sector in protests over poor salaries and living conditions, and tensions heightened after teachers and hospital workers who stopped working in February had their pay docked. A third of the 1.5 million population lives in poverty, according to the African Development Bank, and more than 13% are estimated to live in severe poverty. Meanwhile, an International Monetary Fund report on the country’s economy published in February underlined Gabon's “high” levels of poverty and unemployment.
During a press conference on March 10th, Gabonese presidential spokesman Alain Claude Bilié-By-Nzé described Mediapart’s reports as “tendentious amalgamations of elements that are relative to the administration of the estate of Omar Bongo, therefore of a private nature, and the president of the republic, Ali Bongo”. However, the hidden facts about Delta Synergie demonstrate that with regard to money, the private and public affairs of the Bongo family are one and the same.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse