US Prosecutors Target Luxury Apartment Owned to Congolese Ex-President’s Daughter

The US authorities are looking to forfeit a $7.1 million luxurious apartment bought with embezzled public funds by the Family of Congo’s Ex-President, a court document shows.

US federal prosecutors claimed in a court filing from March that Claudia Lemboumba Sassou Nguesso, the daughter of the long-serving and scandal-plagued president of Central Africa, Dennis Sassou Nguesso, used “funds embezzled from the state coffers” to buy the luxury apartment at Trump International Hotel & Tower.

However, the court document describes how a list of shell companies, allegedly owned by Sassou Nguesso, was used to launder millions of dollars out of the Republic of Congo.

A third of the money used to purchase the house for “personal enrichment” was siphoned from a $19.5 million geological mapping project subcontracted to Sebrit Ltd. This Cyprus-owned company was one of the shell companies used.

With kickbacks from mining, deals carried out through a British Virgin Islands company, the 5th and 7th President, Denis Sassou Nguesso, has captured a part of names on the Pandora papers leak, according to the ICIJ reports.

This forfeiture lawsuit follows an announcement of the financial crimes unit of the U.S. Treasury, FinCEN, which in February proposed a plan to flag “high-risk” transactions relating to real estate purchases via illicit funding.

Meanwhile, the US attorneys said the property has remained unoccupied since it was paid for in 2014 with embezzled public funds.

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