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Equatorial Guinea’s vice-president has accused French telecom operator Orange SA of “fraudulently” giving the .gq domain name to the Netherlands, forcing the African nation’s institutions to pay to use the domain.

Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue said Equatorial Guinea had “discovered that the French from the Orange company engaged in fraudulent manipulation by ceding our domain #gq to the Dutch.”

“Now, we have to pay them to use our own domain, which makes it challenging to set up an institutional website with gq for the country,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

“What have we done to France for it to plunder African countries in this manner? We are once again hindered by their trickery. The West should stop taking advantage of Africa,” he added.

Orange SA has not responded to the claims.

The vice-president, son of long-serving President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, has previously accused Spain, France and the US of interfering in his country’s internal affairs.

In 2020, a French court fined him 30m euros ($32.9m; £26.6m) for embezzling public funds, giving him a suspended jail term and ordering the confiscation of his assets.

The .gq domain name was launched in 1997 by Equatorial Guinean mobile operator Getesa and is reported to be prone to spam, phishing and other malicious use.

BBC Monitoring