| -Caveat Lector-
Mercenaries, money and political connections
Jamie Wilson and David Pallister
Thursday August 26, 2004 The Guardian Simon Mann (51)
The leader of the alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, Simon Mann has spent all of his adult life in the murky worlds of special forces and mercenaries. The son of an England cricket captain who made a fortune from the Watney's brewing empire, Mann followed the establishment route of Eton and Sandhurst before becoming an officer in the SAS. He left the army in the early 1980s, moving into the security business. In 1993 he set up a mercenary outfit, Executive Outcomes, with the controversial entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. It made millions protecting oil installations in Angola from Unita rebels, and operated against insurgents for the Sierra Leone government. A subsidiary company, Sandline International - set up with a former Scots Guard officer, Tim Spicer - famously shipped arms to Sierra Leone in contravention of a UN embargo.
Married with several children, Mann has houses on the Solent in Hampshire and close to Mark Thatcher in Cape Town. He is currently residing in a cell in Chikurubi prison outside Harare.
Ely Calil (58)
The Chelsea-based millionaire, who is accused by the Equatorial Guinea government of helping to organise the coup from his home in west London, made his fortune by trading Nigerian oil. During his years in London he developed discreet links with senior Tory and Labour politicians. At one time he was financial adviser to the disgraced Tory peer Lord Archer. In 1999 the then disgraced Peter Mandelson rented one of Calil's luxury flats in Holland Park for a year, shortly before he was rehabilitated as Northern Ireland secretary. In June 2002, Calil was arrested by French police in connection with the payments of millions of pounds in illegal commissions in 1995 by a subsidiary of the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine to the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. He was later released on appeal without charge, although the payments are still under investigation.
Calil, who has vehemently denied any involvement in the coup plot, has hired British lawyer Imran Khan to fight the high court action brought by the government of Equatorial Guinea.
David Hart (60)
The government of Equatorial Guinea has issued a warrant for the arrest of this Old Etonian businessman with links to the Thatcher family, and claims it has evidence to show he helped to fund the coup plot. Hart was Margaret Thatcher's chief enforcer during the miners' strike - he handed out money to strike breakers from a suite at Claridges - and served as a special adviser to Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Portillo under previous Tory governments, writing the ill-judged Who Dares Wins conference speech.
Hart is known to have excellent access to the US administration and worked closely with the former CIA director William Casey in the early and mid-1980s.
More recently he has worked as a middle man for a number of defence contractors, and has even written a play. He lives on a 500-acre estate in Suffolk.
Nick du Toit (48)
A former member of the special forces unit of the South African Defence Force - used by the apartheid government in the fight against the ANC - Du Toit was detained with 14 other men in Equatorial Guinea on suspicion of being the mercenaries' vanguard. After leaving the defence force in the early 1990s, Du Toit is believed to have worked with Mann at Executive Outcomes. He also became involved in business dealings across Africa, including diamond mining in Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, and fishing rights off the coast. During the 1998 coup attempt in Sierra Leone he was doing diamond deals in the country.
Du Toit was arrested in the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo, immediately after the failed coup attempt, and confessed to being part of the plot.
His wife, who lives in South Africa, claimed afterwards that he had been tortured.
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