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PARIS — France has issued an arrest warrant for the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, a suspect in an investigation into the alleged misspending of public funds, a judicial official said Friday.
The warrant followed Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue’s failure to show up for questioning, and eventual preliminary charges, on Wednesday by investigative judges handling the probe, which targets the acquisition of properties in France by the leaders of Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Republic of Congo, the official said.
News of the warrant, initially revealed by the daily Le Monde, came on the same day that UNESCO, the U.N. cultural arm, announced that it will go ahead with presenting a controversial $3 million research prize from Equatorial Guinea next week that pitted nations against each other at the institution dedicated to world harmony through education and culture.
The prize has drawn condemnation from scholars, human rights groups and Western and other nations because of the poor human rights record of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea and corruption within the ruling clan.
The head of the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Irina Bokova, had herself called the award divisive and tried to pressure Equatorial Guinea to withdraw it. With the board’s passage of the prize despite the controversy, she had said she would seek legal counsel about how to proceed and was apparently left with no choice.
The name of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema was removed from the prize, first approved by UNESCO in 2008, to make it less objectionable to detractors, but that failed to calm the fires.
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