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Mark thatcher sentenced in coup plot { January 14 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Mark-Thatcher-admits-coup-plot-role/2005/01/13/1105582650083.html?oneclick=truehttp://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Mark-Thatcher-admits-coup-plot-role/2005/01/13/1105582650083.html?oneclick=true
Mark Thatcher admits coup plot role
By Sahm Venter
Johannesburg
January 14, 2005
Margaret Thatcher's son is free to leave South Africa after striking a deal to end his court saga.
Sir Mark Thatcher admitted in court yesterday that he "unwittingly" helped finance a plot to overthrow the Government of Equatorial Guinea.
The only son of former British prime minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher was sentenced by the Cape High Court to a fine of 3 million South African rand ($A660,000) and a four-year suspended jail sentence. While he continues to deny he was consciously involved in the coup plot, he has agreed that an African "air ambulance service" he had financed might have been used by mercenaries linked to the plan.
In return for his guilty plea, Thatcher is allowed to leave the country in which he has lived since 1995 and is free to return at any time.
Authorities have returned his passport, which he had to surrender under his bail conditions.
Outside the court, Thatcher said: "There's no price too high for me to pay to be reunited with my family."
It is expected that Thatcher, 51, may return to Britain or travel to Texas, where wife Diane and their two children have been living since his arrest in August last year.
It was alleged that Thatcher provided $A361,000 for the plan to unseat the oil-rich West African country's President, Teodoro Obiang Ngeuma.
Thatcher initially denied the charges, laid under South Africa's anti-mercenary laws, the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act of 1998.
Late last year Thatcher lost a High Court application to refuse to answer questions put to him by Equatorial Guinea prosecutors who had been given permission to interview him.
Commentators have suggested that a visit by Baroness Thatcher to her son over Christmas and New Year might have influenced his decision to admit his involvement in the plot, in which two of his associates were involved.
"She is very relieved that matters have now been settled and that the worry of these past few months is now over," a spokesperson for Baroness Thatcher said in London.
The negotiated guilty plea comes as various South Africans implicated in the plot agreed to testify against Thatcher in return for light sentences.
An apartheid-era pilot, Crause Steyl, who was to be the star witness in Thatcher's trial, said in his own plea bargain that the Briton had not only been aware that helicopters he had financed were to be used in the coup plot, but that he had flown one to test it.
In Harare, the Zimbabwe High Court yesterday cut three years from the jail term imposed by a lower court on the alleged mastermind behind the coup plot.
Briton Simon Mann, a long-time friend of Thatcher's, was sentenced on September 10 to seven years in prison by a magistrate after he was convicted of trying to illegally buy weapons that prosecutors argued were to be used in the coup.
"The jail term was reduced from seven to four years during a review in the High Court this week," Mann's lawyer, Jonathan Samkange, said.
- With AFP
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