Ely Calil
Wealthy oil trader who found himself accused of instigating a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea
ELY CALIL, who has died aged 72 after falling down the stairs at his house in Holland Park, London, was a spectacularly rich oil trader whose name – or rather nickname – kept cropping up in the extraordinary story of a bungled plot in 2004 to topple the government of Equatorial Guinea.
The country, the third largest oil producer in Africa, has been ruled for nearly 40 years by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who seized power in a coup in 1979 and has been accused of corruption, widespread human rights abuses and ruthlessly suppressing political opposition. His critics depict him as a tyrant with a penchant for eating human flesh.
The first the outside world knew of the clandestine operation to depose him was in March 2004, when news broke of the detention of a planeload of mercenaries on board an ageing Boeing 727 at the airport of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.
Simon Mann, an Old Etonian former Army officer turned mercenary, who was identified as the leader of the group, claimed that he and his colleagues were en route to guard a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it soon became clear that the men were in Harare to pick up a consignment of small arms to be used in the operation to replace Obiang with a Madrid-based opposition leader, Severo Moto.
Details then emerged of a conspiracy – it became known as the “Wonga Plot” – which could have come from a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Mann, at the time based in Cape Town, was said to have been persuaded to spearhead a scheme organised by a shadowy group of businessmen to seize control of Equatorial Guinea’s oil production of 450,000 barrels per day.
Calil was linked to the plot when police intercepted a letter that the desperate Mann had written from Harare’s Chikurubi jail to his wife, in which he asked for “Smelly” (subsequently revealed as his nickname for Calil) and “Scratcher” (his nickname for Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher) to come to his aid, and said that he needed “a big splodge of wonga’’ to help get him out.
A signed confession by Mann placed Calil at the centre of the plot. In 2003, he (Mann) had been introduced to Calil in London as the co-founder of a mercenary outfit, Executive Outcomes, which was involved in protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola’s civil wars and offering military support.
Mann claimed that he and Calil had discussed the situation in Equatorial Guinea and that Calil was supporting Severo Moto’s party of exiles in Spain, together with their “underground links” back in the African state. Moto had previously tried to overthrow Obiang in 1997.
Calil arranged for Mann to meet Moto in Madrid, where “they asked me if I could help escort Severo Moto home at a given moment when simultaneously there would be an uprising of both military and civilians against Obiang”. Mann “agreed to help the cause”.
Further details emerged in a confession by Mann’s alleged accomplice, Nick du Toit, who had also worked at Executive Outcomes, from a jail cell in Equatorial Guinea. Du Toit claimed that he had been promised $5m at meetings with Calil and Moto, and had helped to recruit more than 60 veterans of civil wars in Angola and Mozambique to take part in the planned coup. In September 2004, the Equatorial Guinean government attempted to sue Calil for allegedly providing $750,000 to finance the plot. Calil’s solicitor rebutted the claims as “completely false and without foundation”.
Mann and his colleagues were put on trial in Zimbabwe, and in August 2004, Mann was found guilty of attempting to buy arms for an alleged coup plot and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Sixty-six of the others were acquitted. In a separate trial in South Africa in 2005, Sir Mark Thatcher was given a fine and a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to unknowingly helping to finance the plot. He has always denied any direct involvement.
In 2008, Mann was spirited from his Harare prison cell to stand trial in Equatorial Guinea after Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe struck a deal for $7m of the country’s oil. There, Mann, who was said to have struck a private deal with the Obiang regime to tell all, gave an extraordinary interview from prison to Channel 4 News in which he named Calil as “the main man” behind the plot and Sir Mark Thatcher as “part of the team”. In November 2009 Mann was pardoned “on humanitarian grounds” by Obiang.
The accusation prompted the reclusive Calil to give an interview to The Daily Telegraph in July 2008 in which he dismissed Mann’s allegations as a “fantasy” concocted by the Equatorial Guinean authorities for political purposes. He admitted that he supported regime change in the country and had financed plans by Severo Moto to return to his country. He also admitted that Mann and his mercenaries had been hired to provide military assistance.
But he insisted that there had been “no coup plot’’. The idea had merely been to fly Moto back to Equatorial Guinea and to protect him while he was in the country: “Severo’s belief was that if he was protected in his home town and could remain alive for a few days a political storm would occur that would sweep away the present regime.’’ Calil insisted that he knew nothing of the details of Mann’s operation.
At the time of his death, Calil was still wanted by the Equatorial Guinea authorities, although their attempts to sue him in Britain and other countries had come to nothing.
Ely Calil was born on December 8 1945 in Kano, Nigeria, and was privately educated in Europe. His father was Lebanese and had been living in Turkey, but had fallen out with the regime and fled to Nigeria, where in 1941 he founded a groundnut empire and Nigerian Oil Mills (Nom). On his death in 1970, he bequeathed much of his wealth to Ely and his younger brother Bernard.
Ely Calil’s riches multiplied after General Ibrahim Babangida took power in Nigeria in a 1985 coup. As an old friend of Babangida, Calil was able to expand his business into manufacturing batteries, selling trucks and trading in Nigerian oil. He was also reported to have set up a series of front companies for the general. He continued to thrive after Babangida was succeeded, after a short hiatus, by Sani Abacha in 1993.
His wealth (estimated at around £100 million in 2005 – “and that’s just what you can see”, an unnamed “associate” was quoted as saying) allowed Calil to base himself in London, where he owned a portfolio of high-end properties. He also had homes in Switzerland and Nigeria and amassed an impressive collection of art and antiques.
In London he courted the glamorous and powerful, becoming friends with, among others, Jimmy Goldsmith, John Aspinall, Mark Birley, Jeffrey Archer and Peter Mandelson. Yet he himself was secretive to the point of obsession. Before the “Wonga Coup”, the only known publicly available photograph of him dated from 1972.
In June 2002 he was arrested in Paris and questioned by French police over payments of millions of pounds in allegedly illegal commissions made by the French oil company Elf to Sani Abacha, the former Nigerian dictator. He was accused of taking £40m in backhanders for arranging a contract for Elf in Nigeria, but was subsequently released without charge.
The following year he had more unwelcome publicity when Laura Sadler, the girlfriend of his eldest son George Calil, an actor with whom she co-starred in BBC One’s Holby City, died after falling 40ft from the balcony of her boyfriend’s flat in Holland Park. George, who was arrested, admitted they had taken vodka and cocaine, but was released without charge.
Then in 2004 Ely Calil was named as the man who had provided Peter Mandelson with a roof over his head – a flat in Holland Park – after the then Northern Ireland secretary was embroiled in the scandal over an undisclosed loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson which had forced the sale of his Notting Hill home (and his subsequent resignation from the Cabinet). Mandelson was forced to deny claims that Calil had sounded him out over the coup plot.
Calil was thrice married. In 1972 he married Frances Condron, the daughter of a Tennessee tobacco millionaire, with whom he had a son and a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce and soon afterwards he married Hayat Emma Morowa, a Lebanese beauty with whom he had another son and daughter. That marriage, too, ended when Morowa left him for the property tycoon Peter (now Lord) Palumbo. In 1989 he married, thirdly, Renuka Jaine, with whom he had a daughter.
She and his children survive him.
Ely Calil, born December 8 1945, died May 28 2018