(Ecofin Agency) - The French bank group Société Générale has been summoned as a target witness in the case known as «ill-gotten gains», a dossier on alleged misappropriation of public funds implicating Teodorin Obiang, the son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, reports AFP on 3 August, citing a legal source. The status of a target witness is in between being indicted and being a simple witness.

The funds being hunted down by French investigators went through accounts in an Equatorial Guinean branch of the French bank, Société générale de Banque en Guinée-Equatoriale (SGBGE), according to a source close to the investigation. These accounts were used by Teodorin Obiang, who is suspected of having built in France with these alleged misappropriated funds “a sizeable estate of immovable and movable property worth several hundreds of millions of Euros”, the same source added.

Teodorin Obiang, who presently occupies the position of second Vice-President of Equatorial Guinea, was being investigated in March 2014 for “laundering and illegal use of public funds, misappropriation of corporate assets and breach of trust”.

In July 2012, the magistrates in charge of the investigation of 46 year old Teodorin Obiang's fortune, seized a six-storey Paris private mansion in the XVI district, worth 100 to 150 million Euros. The magistrates also seized works of art, antique furniture, fine wines and other precious objects with an estimated total worth of tens of millions of Euros.

‪Launched in 2010 by French magistrates following a complaint filed by the SHERPA association, which defends populations who are victims of economic crime throughout the world, the investigation on ill-gotten gains concerns the means by which three African Heads of State (Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo, Teodoro Obiang and the deceased President Omar Bongo of Gabon) acquired substantial immovable and movable estates in France.