KIGALI, Rwanda
Equatorial Guinea filed a case against France in the International Court of Justice seeking to stop the sale of a mansion in Paris, which the West African country wants to repossess, the court said Friday.
It is the latest in a matter related to the conviction in France of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president, for money laundering and embezzling millions of dollars of public funds.
Teodoro Nguema was sentenced by a Paris court in 2017 to a three-year suspended sentence and fined €30 million. The court ordered that his property in France, worth tens of millions of euros, be seized, which included a mansion on Avenue Foch in Paris. The conviction was upheld in 2020 by an appeals court.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday, Equatorial Guinea argued that its request is on the basis of the UN Convention against Corruption, adopted Oct. 31, 2003, according to a statement by the court.
Equatorial Guinea said despite the request that it made to France to provide, by no later than June 27, 2025, assurances of its commitment not to cause “irreparable prejudice . . . or to further aggravate the dispute or make it more difficult to resolve,” France has failed to provide any assurances that it “will not proceed at any moment with the sale of the building, before the Court is able to decide the dispute on the merits.”
Equatorial Guinea wants France to take all measures to ensure that the building is not put on sale, ensure that Equatorial Guinea has immediate, full and unhindered access to the entire building and refrain from any action which might aggravate or extend the dispute.
On June 18, 2025, French commissioner of the French judicial police and other officers entered the building in the absence of its occupants and without informing them in advance, proceeded to change the locks of several of the doors, according to the statement.
