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A court in Equatorial Guinea Wednesday handed an eight-year jail term for embezzlement to a senior official, Baltasar Ebang Engonga who separately won notoriety for appearing in a series of sex tapes with other officials’ wives.
The Bioko provincial tribunal convicted Baltasar Ebang Engonga of diverting money claimed as professional travel expenses for personal use, the supreme court press director Hilario Mitogo told reporters in a WhatsApp message.
Engonga, the married former head of the national financial investigation agency, and five other senior officials were accused of embezzling expenses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the oil-rich central African state.
Read Also: Osun Monarch Jailed In US For $4.2m COVID-19 Relief Fraud
Nicknamed “Bello”, Engonga made world headlines in November with the sex tapes, some of them filmed in his office at the finance ministry, published on social media while he was in detention pending the embezzlement case.
The clips prompted a wave of online parodies, including songs and dances and posts about a spoof virility drug dubbed “Balthazariem”.
Mitogo said the provincial court handed Engonga an eight-year sentence and a fine worth $220,000.
In other news, Oba Joseph Oloyede, the Apetu of Ipetumodu in Osun State, has been sentenced to 56 months in prison by a United States federal court for orchestrating a multimillion-dollar COVID-19 relief fraud.
The 62-year-old dual U.S.-Nigerian citizen, who resides in Ohio, was also ordered to pay over $4.4 million in restitution and serve three years of supervised release after his prison term.
U.S. District Judge Christopher A. Boyko handed down the sentence on Tuesday, and Oloyede was further required to forfeit his Medina, Ohio home and an additional $96,006.89 in proceeds investigators had seized.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, Oloyede, together with his co-conspirator Edward Oluwasanmi, engaged in a scheme from April 2020 to February 2022 to exploit emergency COVID-19 loan programmes provided by the Small Business Administration (SBA) under the CARES Act.
“From about April 2020 to February 2022, Oloyede and his co-conspirator, Edward Oluwasanmi, conspired to submit fraudulent applications for loans that were made available through the U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act,” the statement said.
