bad penny
Look who’s back:
Mr. Prince’s precise role remains unclear. Some Western officials said that it was possible Mr. Prince was using his international contacts to help broker a deal between Saracen executives and officials from the United Arab Emirates, which have been financing Saracen in Somalia because Emirates business operations have been threatened by Somali pirates.
According to a report by the African Union, an organization of African states, Mr. Prince provided initial financing for a project by Saracen to win contracts with Somalia’s embattled government.
A spokesman for Mr. Prince challenged this report, saying that Mr. Prince “has no financial role of any kind in this matter,” and that Mr. Prince was primarily involved in humanitarian efforts and fighting pirates in Somalia.
And don’t miss this part:
The company makes little public about its operations and personnel, but it appears to be run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, an apartheid-era internal security force notorious for killing opponents of the government.
A little bit of digging around finds this from last month:
Lawmakers are accusing Somalia’s president and prime minister of making secret deals, and United Nations officials have been raising questions about whether some of these contractors might be helping organize and arm new pro-government militias, possibly violating the United Nations arms embargo on Somalia.
It’s a little funny to talk about the Somali parliament as “lawmakers”, given that there is no law in Somalia. Since the government only controls a few blocks of Mogadishu, being in its parliament must be a particularly fruitless exercise.
At least the Ministry of Information has a gmail account so they can straighten things out for us:
PRESS RELEASE 55: SARACEN International
Something else to keep an eye on, I guess.
