The truth about the Wonga Coup ‘cardinal’
After the sudden death of oil tycoon, Ely Calil, Adam Roberts reveals just how he left his fellow plotters hung out to dry
Ely Calil was rich, soft-spoken, well-connected and – among some of his ex-colleagues – intensely disliked. So the 72-year-old’s sudden death this week prompted excited speculation.
To some, it seemed suspicious. He broke his neck apparently after tumbling down the stairs at his Holland Park home. Police called it unexplained, probably an accident.
Calil, whose business dealings helped to spread corruption and misrule in Africa, was named by plotters of the so-called “Wonga coup” as the mastermind financier of their failed scheme.
Despite his partial denials, he had collaborated with Simon Mann, an Old Etonian former SAS officer, in the mercenary-led bid to topple the oil-rich government of Equatorial Guinea. When that fell apart in 2004, Mann and others were dumped in prisons in Africa. Calil shunned their calls for help, later sneering at Mann as deluded and incompetent.
So it is perhaps understandable that Mann showed no sympathy for his ex-patron this week, calling him “dishonest”, “devious” and “manipulative”.
Another figure involved in the Wonga Coup (named after Mann’s plea for “a big splodge of wonga” to help get him out of jail) is equally unsentimental. Nigel Morgan, a trader of intelligence who helped to scotch the plot, this week dismissed Calil as “an evil vulture”.
Known as “Smelly” and “The Cardinal” by the plotters, Calil was a hugely negative influence in Africa, says Morgan – “the sort that has caused so much of the corruption in this continent”. It is hard to disagree. Along with other oil fixers, Calil profited as an intermediary between capital-rich foreign companies and politically influential figures in west Africa, helping to spread corruption, entrench warlord leaders and weaken an already shaky rule of law.
In so doing, Calil became one of the wealthiest men in Britain. One estimate of his assets a little over a decade ago put them at more than £100million. At least one of his London houses, in Chelsea, was crammed with busts of Napoleon, his hero. Some of his wealth was inherited, but most of it came from decades of deal-making in Africa, with Russians in central Asia, and trading oil and gas concessions in South America and beyond.
He had homes in Nigeria, Lebanon and Switzerland – and political connections everywhere. Peter Mandelson, the Labour politician, rented a flat in Holland Park from him after the then Northern Ireland secretary was embroiled in the scandal over an undisclosed loan and had been forced to resign from the Cabinet. Novelist Jeffrey Archer counted him as a friend and a financial adviser. (The former Conservative Party deputy chairman was suspected of having contributed financially to the Wonga Coup, too, though his lawyers denied it.) Another of Calil’s acquaintances was Mark Thatcher. In 2005, he pleaded guilty in South Africa to his part in the Wonga Coup and admitted meeting Calil twice in the build-up to the plot. Thatcher, whom I interviewed, recalled having “tea in his London house”, visiting the Lebanese businessman with Mann. Thatcher said he had been eager to see the quality of Calil’s interior decoration, judging the owner had “supremely good taste”.
Calil’s skill was in befriending the politically powerful and financially weak – men who wanted to “commercialise their power”. Bright, eloquent and charming (he married three times), he had a gift for spotting politicians on the up. He lent an apartment in Paris to Abdoulaye Wade, an exiled Senegalese opposition figure, who later became president and named Calil as an adviser.
But his most powerful connections were in Nigeria. He had been born in Kano, Nigeria, where his father, George, produced aluminium and grew groundnuts. Calil found
At least one of his London houses was crammed with busts of Napoleon, his hero
striking deals with the powerful more fruitful.
Early on, he arranged for a Lebanese airline to fly Nigerian pilgrims to Mecca. Then he moved into Nigeria’s growing oil business. Ibrahim Babangida, who seized power in a coup in Nigeria, in 1985, was an early and powerful patron. Later, it was Sani Abacha, a dictator who grew notorious after hanging pro-democracy activists.
Nobody was beyond the pale as a partner. He was close to Idriss Déby, an ex-warlord and protégé of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator. Déby seized power in Chad in 1990 and still rules today, amid endemic corruption.
Was Calil corrupt? He denied legal wrongdoing, but once told a writer at Harper’s magazine that payoffs were essential to the oil business. “Americans want their gasoline cheap… But it’s not possible without cutting a few corners,” he said.
He was arrested in France in 2002 over huge payments to Sani Abacha by a part of Elf Aquitaine, an oil giant. Others were jailed, but he was not charged; yes, he had been part of making payoffs, but he explained they weren’t really illegal. “It has become illegal now,” he later admitted, because anti-corruption laws grew tougher.
Calil’s activities came under most scrutiny in the Wonga Coup. In the piles of documents I acquired, written by Mann and other plotters, Calil’s nicknames, “Smelly” or “EK” (he sometimes spelt his surname Khalil), appeared repeatedly. They worried Calil would betray them, or push them aside later. Mann would finger him as the chief investor, lead plotter and “Cardinal” of the scheme.
Evidence pointed to that. Investigators asked if he had paid in $750,000 to bankroll the scheme. A company, Asian Trading and Investment Group SAL, registered in Beirut, had signed an investor agreement with the plotters. That looked suspiciously like a front for Calil. Crause Steyl, a pilot in the plot, told me of the “Lebanese consortium”.
An acquaintance of Calil travelled with other plotters via the Canary Islands. Phone records passed to me showed dozens of phone calls made
between Calil’s home and the other plotters.
Mann said he had been recruited by Calil in January 2003, in London. Crucially, he introduced Mann to Severo Moto, a priest and opposition figure from Equatorial Guinea. As an intelligence report noted, a couple of months before the plot was launched, Calil is a “prime mover” and “boasts privately that he has Moto in his pocket”. Moto was to be a new puppet president in Equatorial Guinea, a front for his foreign controllers. Mann was to install him, and a forward team of South African and Angolan mercenaries was already on the ground to help. The prize would be the fruits of Equatorial Guinea’s immense oil reserves, the third largest in Africa.
The escapade, however, fell to pieces when Mann and his mercenaries were grabbed in Zimbabwe while trying to collect a planeload of weapons. The government of Robert Mugabe had been tipped off about the affair by South African intelligence.
Calil later denied his role, calling the whole story a “pack of lies” and joking that, as “a shady Arab”, he was named as an accused for what would be seen as a “great novel”. He also gloated at the failure of Equatorial Guinea to convict him in various prosecution attempts, including a civil suit in Britain.
Yet Calil’s denials did not amount to much. He conceded he was involved with Mann and had introduced him and Moto, expecting Mann to provide security help. He admitted he gave money to Moto for his return from exile and that he wanted regime change. And if Moto had become president, as Calil acknowledged, he would have been in a prime position.
That amounted to wishing for Moto’s return to cause an insurrection, not a coup. It was a distinction without substance – and the most public admission by Calil that he would readily spread instability in Africa if it would help
The prize would be Equatorial Guinea’s oil reserves, the third largest in Africa