Inside Africa: How Africa’s Richest Woman Stole Her Fortune
Forbes
“[She] systematically abused her positions at state-run companies to embezzle at least £350 million, depriving Angola of resources and funding for much-needed development.” This was the notice the UK government released on November 21st announcing sanctions on three ‘notorious kleptocrats’. Two of them are eastern European and stinking rich. The third is called Isabel Dos Santos, once ‘Africa’s richest woman’.
She is the daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, the former president of Angola who ran the country for 39 years. Known as a guerrilla leader for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, he came to power just four years after independence from colonial Portugal, acquiring “near-dictatorial powers, including over Sonangol,” Angola’s state-owned oil giant. For much of his presidency, he fought UNITA, the US-backed opposition group in Angola in what the UN described ‘the worst war in the world’.
After years of civil war killing over 500,000 civilians, in 1999, the tide turned when dos Santos’ forces captured diamond mines which funded UNITA’s war efforts. The president created Angola Selling Corp to manage the new wealth. 24.5% of the company fell under the ownership of Trans Africa Investment Services, a shell company based in Gibraltar. The sole shareholders of it were a mother and her daughter, Isabel dos Santos.
Not long afterwards, Unitel, then a mobile start-up, was given the right to operate nationwide by the president. The company established a vast dominion as the country’s first and leading network. A shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands, Vidatel, has a quarter of Unitel’s stake. Its beneficiary was Isabel dos Santos.
This was the beginning of what would become a vast intricate network of shell companies registered in tax havens across the world which received governmental and private funds from companies related to Angola’s government, all of them tied to Isabel dos Santos. Through the Luanda leaks, an investigation containing over 715,000 confidential documents, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has uncovered an array of loan payments from government owned companies, banks, and international corporations to shell companies owned by Isabel dos Santos, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Isabel grew to fame as Angola’s fierce businesswoman, running ventures and projects in Angola under the guise of a ‘self-made’ personality. In a BBC interview, she once said “If I need to carry boxes with my staff, and we need to put it on the shelves, I’ll be putting it on the shelves in my supermarkets.” Forbes magazine’s acknowledgment of her as Africa’s youngest and first female billionaire in 2013 crowned her with icon status. It also revealed she was a fraud. “As best as we can trace,” the article read, “every major Angolan investment held by Dos Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business in the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the action.”
At the time of the article’s release, Isabel and her husband Sindika Dokolo, a Congolese businessman, had holdings across 19 countries in over 94 different companies, a third of which were shell companies. They lived in properties in Monaco, Lisbon, and London, rubbing shoulders with the world’s wealthiest and most famous. Their stakes in the jewellery and diamond trade, Angolan media companies, two Portuguese banks, and even an Angolan beer called Luandina (after Angola’s capital Luanda), brought the couple billions of dollars in revenues.
Isabel was a board member of both Unitel and Sonangol, two of Angola’s largest companies. For a stake in Unitel, of which Isabel had a quarter, between 2006 and 2015, the ICIJ estimates that shareholders received over $5 billion in dividends. Her position within Angola only expanded from there. By 2013, she owned multiple buildings in Luanda, and oversaw a major urban-renovation project. It would revamp the city’s coastline with a coastal road and a new beach, a fishery port, as well as Dubai-inspired artificial islands. The total cost was $1.3 billion, and involved ambitious dredging and land reclamation which, in her words, required “no need to evict or relocate any residents or any communities”, because it would consist of “100% reclaimed land from the sea.”
This was a lie. On a Saturday morning in June 2013, inhabitants of a residential fishing neighbourhood on a peninsula known as Areia Branca (White Sands) awoke before dawn to police and soldiers forcibly evicting them from their homes. The area, which had been the home of over 3000 poor and hardworking Angolan families for over 50 years, was bulldozed according to SOS Habitat, a non-profit based in Luanda. Some who resisted were beaten. Two died after being run over. According to the residents of Areia Branca, they were told to board trucks which would drive them to new homes. They were left on the side of a road not far away, where many settled in the crowded slum of Povoado.
Urbinveste, one of Isabel’s companies, touched $189 million in an agreement with Marine contractor Van Oord, for obtaining work permits, providing security and government liaisons, and facilitating the construction. Documents suggest another of her companies, Landscape, and its subcontractors kept up to 50% of the contract for the construction of the seafront highway by a Chinese company, China Road and Bridge Corp., which amounts to $328 million. Yet, what was also called the ‘Luanda Masterplan’ is, according to Google Maps, still nothing more than a construction site.
It was around this time when western banks began moving away from Isabel. Questions were being asked regarding large sums of money appearing out of thin air, due diligence on investments, and her status as a ‘politically exposed person’ (high profile individual who consists of a money laundering risk for financial institution). She claimed this was due to discrimination, speaking at LSE in 2017. Yet, as early as 2015, investigators at the Portuguese central bank found Banco BIC, an Isabel owned bank, had failed to monitor transfers to companies from Angola to Europe, worth millions.
In September 2015, Isabel hired Boston Consulting Group during the 2014 oil crisis to draft a 52-page restructuring plan for Sonangol, which included “a leading role” for Wise Intelligence Solutions. The Malta based shell company, owned by Isabel and her husband, received $9.3 million from Angola’s Ministry of Finance to manage the project. Wise hired Boston Consulting for $3.7 million, PwC for $273,000, and Lisbon law firm Viera de Almeida for $490,000. That’s less than half the budget. Where the rest of the money went is unknown. Not a year later, the Angolan government still under her father’s rule, announced they had fired the board of Sonangol, and that Isabel would run the state-owned oil and gas company of annual revenues close to $14 billion.
This was the furthest she got. In September 2017, her father stepped down as president of Angola. His successor, former defence minister João Lourenço, had different plans for the country’s oil giant. Dos Santos and fellow colleagues were all sacked within months. On the same day Isabel was fired, Sonangol wired $38 million to Matter Business Solutions (another shell company linked to Isabel). The transfer request occurred at 6:30 pm. Isabel’s firing was reported five hours earlier. More funds were wired later, allegedly to resolve debts made to Matter while she was in charge.
Isabel’s business empire has since started to leak all over. Her assets were frozen, and her public work contracts were cancelled by the new Angolan government, which includes the construction project on Luanda’s coastline. She was also cut off from the country’s state diamond-trading company. In Europe as well, previous business partners have turned cold. Isabel of course denies any wrongdoing, insisting that she is the victim of a political witch hunt. The UK government’s sanctions announced recently however confirm that her persecution is not isolated to Angola. The Luanda leaks suggest that she embezzled millions of Angola’s state funds. There have been no criminal charges brought upon her so far.
