How Angolan ruler’s daughter used her status and Maltese connections to build $2bn empire
Leaks show how Isabel dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman at the expense of Angolan state
The complex financial schemes that helped Africa’s richest woman amass a fortune at vast cost to the Angolan state have been revealed for the first time after a huge leak of confidential documents from her business empire.
Isabel dos Santos, who is known as “the princess” in Angola, the oilrich nation her father ruled as president for almost four decades, has long denied that her estimated $2.2bn fortune is the result of nepotism or corruption.
However, an investigation by The Guardian and journalists in 20 countries, led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, suggests Dos Santos benefited from extraordinary opportunities afforded to her by the government of her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, before he stood down as president in September 2017.
The businesswoman, who spends much of her time in London, controls interests across Africa and Europe spanning banking, telecoms, TV, cement, diamonds, alcohol, supermarkets and real estate.
The Luanda Leaks are based on a trove of 715,000 emails, charts, contracts, audits and accounts that was obtained initially by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa, an anti-corruption charity whose work with key witnesses helped topple the South African leader Jacob Zuma. The trove was then shared with the ICIJ.
Dos Santos and her husband, the businessman and art collector Sindika Dokolo, say computers belonging to their employees and legal advisers were hacked. They say they are the subjects of a politically motivated witch-hunt led by
Angola’s new president. Through their lawyers, they rejected any allegation of wrongdoing and vehemently denied being financed by state money.
After a seven-monthinvestigation, The Guardian, working alongside outlets including the BBC, the New York Times and Portugal’s Expresso newspaper, has uncovered documents that raise questions over preferential deals and lucrative transactions with the Angolan state worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The material reveals an opaque network of about 400 companies, many of them offshore, connected to Dos Santos, Dokolo and their associates, and the assistance given to the couple in managing them by a coterie of European and American management consultants, accountants and lawyers.
The spoils were shared with a select group with links to politics and the military. As a result, Africa’s second-largest oil producing nation became known as one of the most corrupt countries on Earth, ranking near the bottom of the Transparency International corruption perceptions index.
“These are the classic symptoms of a captured state,” said Steve Goodrich, a senior research manager at Transparency International UK, after reviewing the Luanda Leaks findings. “Here we have industry and politics all in one family, with no apparent separation of powers.”
The leak includes data from Fidequity, a team of advisers who acted as a family office for the couple, administering their empire from plush premises above a Louis Vuitton salesroom in Lisbon.
As the couple grew richer, emails and Board minutes show the number of banks prepared to have them as clients dwindled. The data indicates that top-tier lenders severed ties after the Dos Santos regime was ruled a corruption risk by compliance departments.
Company service providers in the Netherlands and the Isle of Man also turned down their business, the files suggest. Dokolo says he has been unable to open bank accounts under his own name in London and Paris since 2001.
Other European companies appear to have taken a different approach, helping the couple move money and win lucrative contracts from the Angolan state. The blue chip firms PwC and Boston Consulting Group collected millions in fees, providing services such as auditing of accounts and management consultancy.
PwC, which handled auditing and accounts for Dokolo companies in
Malta, Switzerland and the Netherlands, said it had opened an internal investigation “in response to the very serious and concerning allegations” and “taken action to terminate any ongoing work for entities controlled by members of the Dos Santos family”.
BCG said senior partners conducted regular reviews. “We are proud of and take responsibility for our work and are strict in adhering to our policies and values,” a spokesperson said.
According to The Times of Malta, authorities in Angola have compiled a list of at least 10 Maltese companies they believe the billionaire daughter of a former African dictator may have used to siphon money out of state enterprises.
Isabel dos Santos and her husband Sindika Dokolo used local financial service practitioners, including a former MP, to set up the letterbox companies, some of which were given Angolan state contracts and funds.
One of those companies was Wise Intelligence Solutions Limited, a Maltese shell company set up by Ganado Advocates and administered by former Nationalist MP Noel Buttigieg Scicluna.
WISL was given a €8.5m contract to carry out consultancy services, despite having never traded since being set up in 2010.
The contract was purportedly to help reform Angola’s struggling state-owned energy company Sonangol. WISL subcontracted the work out to Boston Global Consulting and PwC.
WISL declared a profit of €2.4m in 2016 on the back of the Sonangol contract as well as a contract with Angola Telecom, another state-owned entity. Leaked documents obtained by the ICIJ from the whistleblower platform PPLAAF and shared with its reporting partners, including The Times of Malta, show local auditor Roberto Micallef questioned how WISL, which he described as a firm that does not have “human resources and specific know-how”, could carry out such consultancy work.
Seven months after the consultancy work was given to WISL, Dos Santos was made chairwoman of Sonangol.
WISL is just one of several firms which have come under scrutiny by investigators working to unravel a web of companies which Dos Santos and her husband set up.
Many of those companies mirrored their financial interests in state-owned Angolan ventures, ranging from beer production, energy companies and diamonds.
Analysis of the leaked documents raises red flags in two more Maltese companies jointly owned by Angola’s diamond marketing entity Sodiam and Dos Santos’ husband.
The companies, Victoria Limited and Victoria Holding, were used to pump millions into acquiring 75% of de Grisogono, a luxury Swiss jewellery company.
Angola’s investment in a jewellery company can be traced to a series of transactions in 2012 that quietly routed millions through shell companies in Malta and the British Virgin Islands.
Records indicate that Sodiam supplied the bulk of the funding to Victoria Holding and Victoria Limited for the acquisition of the jewellery company.