Conservative MP take five-star junket to Equatorial Guinea - The Daily Telegraph

Interesting postscript at the bottom of this article about Margaret Moran - It looks like they are throwing the book at her!


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8855776/Conservative-MP-take-five-star-junket-to-Equatorial-Guinea.html

Conservative MPs enjoyed a five-star trip to Equatorial Guinea over the summer paid for by its dictatorial regime.
By Holly Watt, Whitehall Editor7:00AM BST 29 Oct 2011
Nadine Dorries, Steve Baker and Caroline Nokes stayed at the Sofitel Sipopo in the capital, Malabo.
The hotel features an 18-hole golf course and a spa. The cost of the visit was almost £25,000 and they flew business class to the oil-rich African country.
The group travelled with the Triarius Foundation, which is based in Malta and promotes West African and Islamic states.
It was given a grant by the Equatorial Guinean government to fund the trip and subsequently produced a report on the visit which dismissed the nation’s human rights violations as “trivial”.
The conclusions will raise concerns about the independence of the MPs’ visit to the country, which was the subject of the unsuccessful coup led by the British mercenary Simon Mann in 2004.
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The Labour MP Paul Flynn said the trip was “unbelievable” and that the MPs should have informed themselves about the regime of President Teodoro Obiang.
“It is monstrous naivety not to make a few basic enquiries about a regime run by someone who appears to be half way between Adolf Hitler and Attila the Hun,” said Mr Flynn.
“Five minutes of research should have informed these MPs that this was not a regime with which our parliamentarians should be associating. One would have thought that recent events in Libya would remind MPs that cosying up to corrupt dictators is unwise.”
President Obiang has been in power since 1979 and is accused of torturing his opponents.
Seventy per cent of the nation’s 680,000 people live in poverty, and tens of thousands have no access to electricity or clean water, according to the African Development Bank.
However, the Triarius report states that while Equatorial Guinea has been criticised for the suppression of freedom of speech, most of the criticism is “trivial” and has come from “self-interested, unrepresentative, and unaccountable pressure groups whose business models require them to generate indignation and concern among those from whom they rely for funding”.
The findings contrast with a recent report by Amnesty International, which concluded: “Press freedom remained severely restricted with most media outlets controlled by the state.”
The charity also stated that “soldiers and police officers tortured and ill-treated detainees and others with impunity ”.
In August last year, four men were executed for allegedly trying to assassinate the president after a trial which was widely condemned internationally.
The Triarius report claimed the four men were given a “public trial” in which standards were “superior” to the “extra-judicial killings ... routinely carried out by US authorities”.
This week the US accused the president’s son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, of spending $100 million of his country’s money on luxuries including a private jet and a home in Malibu.
Mrs Dorries declined to comment on the Triarius report and said she had written a separate paper. Mr Baker said: “I received a call from Nadine Dorries asking me if I wanted to join the delegation and I thought it would be useful to get an idea of how Equatorial Guinea worked and see if I could do some good. Quite honestly, I wish I hadn’t gone. The country is governed extremely badly.”


Þ A former Labour MP accused of fiddling her parliamentary expenses will stand trial next April. Margaret Moran, 56, who represented Luton Souh, faces 21 charges and allegedly claimed £80,000 and “flipped” her second home. She was not at yesterday’s hearing in London.