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09/15/2004:

"African jail is the right place for heir behind a failed coup"

Simon Mann, heir to the Watney's beer fortune, graduate of Eton and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, former cofounder of Executive Outcomes, a leading mercenary outfit in Africa in the '90s, currently resident at Chikurubi maximum security prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, believes that "a large splodge of wonga" (a large amount of money) would spare him most of the seven-year term to which he was sentenced last Friday. A number of his co-conspirators apparently believe the same. They just don't get it.

The conspiracy was classic African stuff: a planeload of mercenaries flying across Africa, picking up a consignment of weapons as they went, to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny dictatorship that is Africa's third-largest oil exporter.

Full Article : startribune.com