Oil Workers Detained in Equatorial Guinea Return to South Africa | Company Business News

(Bloomberg) — South African contractors jailed in Equatorial Guinea after working in the country’s offshore oil fields returned home on Saturday following more than two years of detention.

Peter Huxham and Frik Potgieter, both South African nationals, were arrested on drug-trafficking charges in February 2023, days after a South African court ordered the seizure of one of Equatorial Guinean Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue’s yachts. The two incidents were linked, Bloomberg reported in April last year.

South Africa raised concerns over the detention and requested the release of the men, who have denied any wrongdoing. They were pardoned earlier this month, the vice president of Equatorial Guinea, known as Teodorin, said in a post on X.

“The Government consistently appealed for clemency, highlighting the humanitarian aspects of the case and the profound impact on the families of the detained,” South Africa’s ministry of international relations said in a statement. It added that it “acknowledges the complexity of the matter, including its sensitive diplomatic and legal dimensions.”  

Huxham and Potgieter worked for the same Dutch oil services company, though the men had never met before. SBM Offshore NV booked them into the same hotel ahead of their flights back to South Africa. They were, in short order, arrested, convicted of cocaine trafficking, sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $5 million each.

The men had been working on Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. production vessels off the Equatorial Guinea coast when Teodorin Obiang lost a court case in South Africa. The vice president had two of his properties in Cape Town seized, along with the 67-meter yacht, the Blue Shadow, which he maintained belongs to his country’s Ministry of Defense.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in an opinion on the case last year found the imprisonment of the South Africans was in breach of multiple international human rights and that they should be released.  

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