Oil Workers Detained in Equatorial Guinea Return to South Africa

(Bloomberg) – South African contractors were imprisoned after working on the country’s open sea oil fields.

Both Peter Huxham and Frik Potgieter, both South African citizens, were arrested for drug trafficking charges in February 2023, days after the South African Court’s Ecuadorian Guinea Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue seized their yachts. Bloomberg reported that two events were connected in April last year.

South Africa expressed his concerns about detention and asked for the release of men who rejected any injustice. Vice President of Ecuadoral Guinea, known as Teodorin, said that they were forgiven at the beginning of this month in an article in X.

“The government has constantly objected to strength by emphasizing the humanitarian aspects of the case and the deep effect on the detained families.” He said. He added that he accepted the complexity of the issue, including precise diplomatic and legal dimensions ”.

Huxham and Potgieter worked at the same Dutch oil services company, but men had never met before. SBM Offshore NV reserved them to the same hotel before flights to South Africa. In short, they were convicted of cocaine smuggling, sentenced to 12 years in prison, and was fined $ 5 million each.

When Teodorin Obiang lost his court case in South Africa, men EXXON Mobile Corp. and Chevron Corp. Production ships were working from the Ecuadoral Guinea coast. The Vice President seized two properties in Cape Town, a 67 -meter yacht, the blue shadow, belonged to the Ministry of Defense of his country.

The United Nations Working Group was arbitrarily detained in an opinion about last year’s case. He found that the prison sentence of the South Africans had violated more than one international human rights and should be released.

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