How does Simon Mann stack up among Africa's white mercenaries?

4. Lt. Col. Tim Spicer. Former Lieutenant Colonel Spicer is the outlier in this group, a man with a past in murky wars of Africa but who has since very successfully gone legit. Like Mann, who he worked with from time to time, he was a graduate of Sandhurst and served in the Scots Guard. He founded and ran Sandline International and was deeply involved in the company's war against the Bougainville rebels in Papua New Guinea. In 1998, Sandline was also investigated for breaking a UN arms embargo in Sierra Leone in favor of the country's deposed leader, the pro-British Ahmed Kabbah. Spicer said at the time that his actions were authorized by the British government and he suffered no sanctions from the affair. Sandline was eventually dissolved and Spicer founded a new company, Aegis Defense Services, which to date has won more than $3oo million worth of security contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Spicer has been leading the charge in calling for private military contractors to be professionalized, and has worked on drafting basic standards for the emerging industry, including lobbying the British government for the industry. He described the PMC's roles in a 2006 interview with The Guardian. "I've always said that in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone there was nothing wrong with what Sandline was doing because we were there at the request of the democratically elected governments," he argues. "But it attracted a lot of attention and played into the hands of people who felt that this was not a good way of doing things. The idea was well before its time. There was a huge amount of suspicion, mistrust, and poor connotation attached to the security business at that time." The Gurdian summed up his position on the "mercenary" tag:

"Although Spicer was happy to use it in its literal sense five years ago, it now makes him uncomfortable. 'It's a pejorative term,' he shrugs. "Mercenaries are bad.'"

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Is the president of Equatorial Guinea worse than the British mercenary he pardoned?

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo – who today pardoned Simon Mann – is widely seen as one of Africa’s most corrupt leaders. But will oil interests prevent a shift in US policy? Read our special report.

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