Sir Mark: Wayward son
2005-01-13 13:49
London - Mark Thatcher, who was heavily fined on Thursday in a Cape Town court after pleading guilty in a plea bargaining deal in relation to an alleged African coup plot, first hit the headlines in 1982 when he disappeared in the Sahara desert for six days during the Paris to Dakar car rally.
That incident placed him in the British mind as one of the few who ever made his mother, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, show any personal feelings in public.
Thatcher, 51, was fined R3m ($505 000) and given a four-year suspended prison term after the plea bargain. If he fails to pay the fine by Saturday he will have to serve a five-year term.
The businessman was arrested on August 25 last year at his Cape Town villa on charges of contributing $275 000 to help finance the suspected plot to overthrow long-time Equatorial Guinea leader Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
The cash was to buy a helicopter, which Thatcher said he believed was to be used as an air ambulance.
Disappeared in the Sahara
It was in January 1982, as a somewhat wayward 28-year-old with a taste for motor racing, that Thatcher first made news when he disappeared in the Sahara.
Facing the press then to talk about her missing son who she feared might have been kidnapped, the famously tough Iron Lady shed a tear before the television cameras in what was then an unprecedented show of personal emotion.
As it turned out, Mark and his co-driver had simply broken an axle on their Peugeot 504 and were unharmed when spotter planes eventually located them waiting in their broken-down car.
Up until his arrest by South African police last year, the younger Thatcher's brush with death in the desert was his chief claim to fame.
Otherwise, he had managed to acquire the reputation of being a generally amiable if slightly blundering figure who had managed to make himself wealthy despite a distinctly mixed record in business.
Mark Thatcher and his twin sister, Carol, were born on August 15 1953, the only children of the future prime minister, then working as a lawyer before entering politics, and her husband, businessman Denis Thatcher.
Less diligent, less intelligent
Educated at Harrow, the exclusive English school once attended by Winston Churchill, Mark Thatcher is viewed as less diligent - and, perhaps, less intelligent - than his twin, who has carved out a solid career for herself as a journalist and author.
Sir Mark Thatcher, as he now is having inherited his late father's baronetcy in 2003, has been accused in the past of using the family name to build his fortune, estimated at £60m ($120m).
In 1977, with cars his passion, the budding businessman launched his own car racing stable, Mark Thatcher Racing, which later went bust. Later he worked in the United States for the British sports car company Lotus.
There was public criticism over his involvement in obtaining a construction contract in Oman for Cementation, a British civil engineering firm, just after a visit there in 1986 by his mother there, obliging the Iron Lady to make a statement to the House of Commons.
In February 1987, Mark married Texan heiress Diane Burgdorf, with whom he has had two children, and moved to the United States for some years, becoming involved in a series of business ventures with mixed success.
Trouble never far behind
In late 1995, after reportedly losing million of pounds in business deals, he and his wife decided to make a new life in South Africa, buying a plush, six-bedroom house in the exclusive Cape Town suburb of Constantia.
However even there, trouble was not far behind.
Within a few months of his arrival, his now ex-premier mother flew into the country amid reports Mark was having trouble renewing his South African visa.
Subsequently, Thatcher lived a generally quiet and low-profile life in Cape Town, where his near-neighbours included Earl Spencer, elder brother of the late Princess Diana.
However, a series of British newspaper reports linked Thatcher to the backers of foreign mercenaries accused of a plot to topple President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in Equatorial Guinea.
Another neighbour, British mercenary Simon Mann, was among 67 people arrested aboard a plane at Harare airport in March as they were allegedly on their way to stage the coup in Equatorial Guinea.
Mann was sentenced in September by a Zimbabwe court to seven years in prison - reduced this week to four years - while two pilots of the plane were given 16 months, while the rest of the men aboard were each slapped with a one-year jail term.
In November, an Equatorial Guinea court country gave stiff jail sentences to five South Africans and six Armenians in the same alleged plot.
South African Nick du Toit was found guilty of organising the logistics for the plot, and was jailed for 34 years and fined 1.3 billion CFA francs (about $2m), while Moto was sentenced in absentia to 64 years in jail and fined two billion CFA francs.
Equatorial Guinea prosecutors still want to question Thatcher.