Simon Mann, mercenary who was jailed for leading an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea

Yahoo

09-05-2025

Simon Mann, who has died aged 72, was an Old Etonian, former SAS officer and soldier of fortune who made millions from providing mercenaries to protect diamond mines and oil refineries in Africa; in 2004, however, he bit off more than he could chew when he became involved in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.
The plot went disastrously wrong when Mann and 67 fellow 'mercenaries' – mostly old sweats from Apartheid-era South Africa's bush wars – were arrested by Zimbabwean security forces at Harare Airport, where they had touched down in order to take on a consignment of arms. Mann claimed that they were on their way to protect diamond interests in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. But they were accused of setting out to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's tyrannical president Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
The story of the alleged coup contained more implausible characters and plot twists than an airport paperback thriller. There was an African dictator who allegedly enjoyed feasting on human testicles, there was the promise of liquid gold – offshore oil reserves that promised to make millions for those daring enough to seize them; there were walk-on roles for mercenaries, business tycoons, the disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer, exiled politicians and Baroness Thatcher's son, Mark.
At the centre of everything was Mann, maverick scion of the Watney's brewing empire who seemed to be a throwback to the days of Cecil Rhodes, when white buccaneers toppled governments and ran private fiefdoms. The adventures on which Mann embarked would lead him, eventually, to a foetid cell in Harare's notorious Chikurubi prison, from which he was extradited in secret in February 2008 to Equatorial Guinea, where he was incarcerated in the infamous Black Beach jail.
In November 2009 President Obiang granted Mann a complete pardon on humanitarian grounds.
Simon Mann was born on June 26 1952. His father, George Mann, was a former Guards officer who captained the England cricket team on their 1948-49 tour of the Cape (Simon's grandfather had also been England cricket captain). Described by the cricketer's bible Wisden as a 'forceful batsman, prone to hitting hard', he later became chairman of Watney's, the brewing giant.
Simon followed his father and grandfather to Eton, where he bucked the family trend by preferring rowing to cricket and, according to one friend, was always planning African coups at the back of the class; he was always known as 'Maps Mann' because he always had maps in his hand.
Lacking academic ability, he sought an outlet for his daredevil instincts in the Army. After training as an officer at Sandhurst he took a commission in the Scots Guards and did a three-year stint as a troop commander in G Squadron of 22 SAS. Returning to the regular Army, he completed a tour of Northern Ireland and had postings in Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Canada and central America.
In the mid-1980s Mann left the army to go into 'business', the precise nature of which remained a mystery even to some of his closest relatives. After a stint selling computer software he moved into the 'security' business, providing bodyguards to wealthy Arabs to protect their Scottish estates from poachers, before briefly getting back into uniform in 1990 to serve on British Gulf war commander Sir Peter de la Billière's staff in Riyadh.
In 1993 he set up Executive Outcomes with the entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. A mercenary outfit, it made a fortune protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola's civil war and training Angolan government troops. Two years later he established an offshoot, Sandline International, with a fellow former Guardsman, Lt-Col Tim Spicer, and shipped arms to Sierra Leone in apparent contravention of a UN embargo.
With an estimated £10 million in the bank, Mann bought Inchmery, a former residence of the Rothschild family on the banks of the river Beaulieu in Hampshire, together with a Cape Dutch gabled house in Constantia, a secluded suburb of Cape Town whose inhabitants at one time included Earl Spencer and Sir Mark Thatcher.
There, he and his third wife, Amanda, became well-known figures on the Cape social scene. As well as meeting Baroness Thatcher at a party thrown by Mark, in a rare foray into the public domain Mann agreed to play the part of Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the paratroopers who fired on marchers in Derry, in a 2001 television reconstruction of Bloody Sunday.
The story of the alleged coup plot emerged from 'confessions' made in prison by Mann and his alleged co-conspirator Nick du Toit, a former South African special officer and member of Executive Outcomes, who had been arrested a day after Mann in the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo.
In his testimony Mann said that he had been approached in 2003 by the Chelsea-based Lebanese oil tycoon, Ely Calil, who had made his fortune trading oil in Nigeria and was a friend of Severo Moto Nsá, self-styled president of the Equatorial Guinea government-in-exile. Moto had long sought the overthrow of President Obiang, and at a subsequent secret meeting in Spain the three men allegedly hatched a plot to bring about the tyrant's downfall.
It was claimed that the three men struck a deal under which Calil and Mann would arrange to put Moto in power in return for a lump-sum payment of $16 million. Mann would also get the rights to supply Guinea's future security needs and Calil would become the country's chief oil broker.
With the deal concluded, Mann and Calil were alleged to have set about raising the money needed to pay for the operation. The basic deal was that 10 investors would each contribute £100,000. In return they would share £15 million between them on the coup's completion, with the hope of further dividends as the oil began to flow.
Du Toit was tasked with recruiting the 80 or so mercenaries needed and, from these, he would take a small advance guard to Guinea in the guise of being involved in a tourist business. Once they were installed, Mann would fly in under cover of darkness with the rest of the men. The president would be seized in his bed and Moto installed.
All began according to the alleged plan, and on March 7, with du Toit in Malabo, 64 mercenaries boarded an old Boeing 727 which Mann had bought for $400,000, and took off for Harare from Wonderboom airport near Pretoria.
When the aircraft touched down at Harare airport, it taxied to the military sector, where those on board were expecting to link up with Mann and pick up their weaponry. Instead, Mann, the three flight crew and all 64 mercenaries on board were arrested and their weapons seized. The next day, du Toit and his 14-strong group were arrested in Malabo.
All those named by Mann and du Toit in their testimonies denied any involvement in the plot and claimed that the men had been tortured to make false statements, and Mann later claimed that his initial statements had been made under duress. Relatives of those arrested in Harare maintained that they had been on their way to Congo to guard diamond mines. It was noted that the small-scale and rather amateurish nature of the operation hardly suggested planning for a military coup.
But other evidence seemed to lend weight to the coup-plot theory. A South African telecoms tycoon, Gianfranco Cicogna, recalled being approached by Mann to invest $120,000 in a 'project' in Equatorial Guinea (he declined). Documentary evidence from one of Mann's offshore companies, Logo Logistics, showed that a person by the name of JH Archer transferred £74,000 to the company just four days before the alleged coup attempt. 'JH' are the initials of Lord Archer, a friend of Ely Calil. Archer's lawyers denied that he had sent money and both he and Calil denied knowing of any coup plot.
The biggest fish to become entangled in the scandal was Baroness Thatcher's son, Mark, who was alleged to have paid for a helicopter to fly Moto into Guinea on the night of the coup. His name entered the fray after an explosive but hilarious letter from Mann to his wife was intercepted by prison guards.
In the letter, written shortly after his arrest, Mann asked her to elicit the help of chums on the alleged plot's 'wonga list' of financial supporters: 'Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT,' Mann wrote. 'They [the lawyers] get no reply from Smelly [thought to be Ely Calil] and Scratcher [the nickname Mann used for Thatcher, on account of the acne he suffered while at school]...'
But Mann then went on to suggest that Scratcher's involvement amounted to more than using his contacts to lobby for their release. 'It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga!' he wrote. 'Of course investors did not think this would happen. Do they think they can be part of something like this with only upside potential – no hardship or risk of this going wrong? Anyone and everyone in this is in it – good times or bad. Now it's bad times and everyone has to f---ing well pull their full weight… Once we get into a real trial scenario we are f---ed.'
He ended the letter with the words: 'Anyway [another contact] was expecting project funds inwards to Logo from Scratcher… If there is not enough, then present investors must come up with more.'
On July 22 2004 Mann was convicted in Zimbabwe on two counts of attempting to buy firearms illegally. He was sentenced to seven years, later reduced to four. Sir Mark Thatcher was arrested in August 2004 and given a four-year suspended prison term and a hefty fine after pleading guilty to breaking anti-mercenary legislation in South Africa by agreeing to finance the chartering of a helicopter, though he denied knowledge of the coup plot and maintained that his involvement had been unwitting.
Kept in solitary confinement at his own request, Mann was said to have endured torture and privation. In April 2007 he was said to be suffering multiple organ failure and to be suffering from a life-threatening intestinal condition caused by poor diet. Hopes that the Zimbabwean courts would turn down any request for his extradition to Equatorial Guinea were dashed in May 2007 when, shortly after his release from jail, he was rearrested following a decision by a Harare court to reject defence arguments that he would not be given a fair trial in Guinea and was likely to be tortured.
After his extradition, in March 2008 he was allowed, or possibly encouraged, to give an interview to Channel 4 News in which he again fingered Ely Calil as the mastermind behind the 'f***-up', said that Sir Mark Thatcher was 'part of the team' but dismissed suggestions that Lord Archer or Peter Mandelson were involved.
Urbane, charming and apparently relaxed, despite the shackles and years of solitary confinement, Mann claimed not to have been put under pressure by the Equatorial Guinea authorities, though there were suspicions that he might have agreed to 'spill the beans' in return for being spared the death penalty.
Simon Mann was married three times. His first two marriages were dissolved and he married thirdly, in 1995, Amanda Freedman, with whom he had four children. They survive him with three children of his earlier marriages.
Simon Mann, born June 26 1952, death announced May 9 2025
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