Self-made billionaire, she often claimed and often posted inspiration messages of how hard work makes dreams come true. In 2013, soon after she was named a billionaire, she told the Financial Times that her entrepreneurial spirit dated back to age 6, when she started her first business, selling chicken eggs to support her cotton candy habit.
"I'm someone who wakes up in the morning, very early, goes out to the field, puts on the boots," dos Santos recently told the BBC. "I build stuff, if necessary. 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."
But Isabel dos Santos' estimated fortune of $2 billion was far from the fruition of hard work. Instead, the 46-year-old 'billionaire daughter of a dictator' with the help of her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, an autocrat who ruled Angola for 35 years and her husband Sindika Dokolo a Congolese art collecter built her fortune using stolen Angolan state funds.
The Luanda Leaks, a new 8-month investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 36 media partners has exposed two decades of unscrupulous deals that made dos Santos Africa's wealthiest woman and left oil-and diamond-rich Angola one of the poorest countries on earth.
The investigations also reveal how 'African corruption' is far from African corruption with Western companies and agencies, banks and firms facilitating the looting from the world's poorest.
Based on more than 715,000 confidential financial and business records and hundreds of interviews, Luanda Leaks offers a case study of a growing global problem: Thieving rulers, often called kleptocrats, and their family members and associates are moving ill-gotten public money to offshore secrecy jurisdictions, often with the help of prominent Western firms. From there, the money is used to buy up properties, businesses and other valuable assets, or it is simply hidden away, safe from tax authorities and criminal investigators.
"The movement of dirty money through shell companies into the international financial system to be laundered, recycled, and deployed for political influence is accelerating," says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "It heightens the danger of political violence and human rights abuses."
ICIJ found that dos Santos, her husband and their intermediaries built a business empire with more than 400 companies and subsidiaries in 41 countries, including at least 94 in secrecy jurisdictions like Malta, Mauritius and Hong Kong. Over the past decade, these companies got consulting jobs, loans, public works contracts and licenses worth billions of dollars from the Angolan government.
In 2009, her business empire had expanded to include stakes in Portuguese banks and media companies, which provided her with millions of dollars in dividends. She renovated her $2.5 million duplex penthouse in Lisbon.
One invoice reviewed by ICIJ showed $50,000 spent on curtains, $9,200 on chaise lounges and nearly $7,500 on gym equipment from Harrods. Six years later, she bought a second apartment on one of the same floors for $2.3 million, though local land registry records don't indicate if the two units were merged into one.
Using shell companies in many tax havens such as Malta, dos Santos would use the tiny Mediterranean nation to dodge taxes and launder money across the globe. According to the documents, the dos Santos had by March 2013 created or invested in at least 94 companies in 19 countries. A third of these were shell companies.
Dos Santos and her husband Dokolo used a Maltese shell company, Athol Limited, to buy a $55 million apartment in Monte Carlo, documents show. In 2010, they acquired a controlling stake in a struggling Swiss luxury jeweller, de Grisogono. Dokolo's idea was to create a company that would control Angola's diamond industry from mining to polishing to retail, he told ICIJ through his lawyers.
Sodiam helped finance the acquisition and loaned the jewellery company more than $120 million total, records show. Dokolo — who invested his own funds in the jewellery company — had "full control of the management," according to a draft shareholder agreement in the leaked documents.
In the interview with RFI, Dokolo said the use of offshore jurisdictions was a business necessity. "It is very difficult for someone from Angola or the [Democratic Republic of the Congo], which are countries completely blacklisted on European markets, to open a bank account on European soil," he said. "If you are like me, a politically exposed person since 2001, it is almost impossible. I can be criticized for using financial vehicles located in tax havens, but is that illegal?"
The couple claimed through lawyers to have received no tax benefits through their offshore companies.
Reputation under fire
On June 12, 2013, less than two weeks after the Areia Branca evictions, dos Santos faced a question about a massive transfer of money. Unitel had made $460 million in loans the previous year to a Dutch shell company called Unitel International Holdings, later revealed to be owned by dos Santos.
Luis Pacheco de Melo, a representative of PT Ventures, one of four partners in Unitel, asked at a shareholders meeting whether the board of directors had signed off on the deal. Dos Santos assured him that the loans were properly approved, according to board meeting minutes.
De Melo wasn't the only one asking about the family's finances. An agent in charge of registering Mauritius companies for dos Santos' telecom business found information about her "source of wealth" missing from the documents.
A $1.3 million transfer from the Maltese holding company that controlled the Swiss jeweller to a Dokolo shell in the British Virgin Islands baffled a Swiss accountant. Auditors for the Maltese company couldn't find agreements for millions of dollars in loans from the Angolan government to the jewellery company.
On the Isle of Man, John Murphy, a local director for a shell company used to acquire London real estate, discovered a mysterious $50 million credit on its bank statement. "It cause[s] us serious concern," Murphy said in an August 2015 email to a dos Santos attorney.
He resigned soon after.
And, the documents show, Western banks started to back away. Regulators globally had been cracking down on financial institutions that didn't carefully vet public officials and those connected to them. Banks and financial regulators consider these clients, known as "politically exposed persons," or PEPs, as money laundering risks.
In 2012, Citigroup Global Markets Limited abruptly abandoned an investment deal linked to dos Santos; the banking giant later paid $15 million as part of a confidential settlement. Barclays Bank bailed on a similar deal a year later. Both banks were responding to concerns about the company's shareholders, including Sonangol and Exem Energy, documents show.
Emails show that the dos Santos financial team struggled to find banks to handle her growing business.
"I'm a bit concerned on the Deutsche," wrote Konema Mwenenge, one of Dokolo's closest advisers, referring to Deutsche Bank. "Sindika had accounts with Deutsche in the past and [they] were closed. They also blocked some of his payments when they acted as correspondent banks for several beneficiaries."
Dutch trust company Intertrust and ING bank closed accounts of dos Santos and Dokolo-linked companies that invested in Galp. One dos Santos business manager told another in an email that one bank had said Dutch authorities were scrutinizing her companies and imposing "extremely complex diligence" requirements.
One dos Santos executive complained to another that Spanish banking giant Banco Santander "ran like the devil from the cross" because of her status as a politically exposed person.
In September 2013, dos Santos' reputation took a big public hit. In an article written by Kerry A. Dolan, a staff writer, and Rafael Marques, a journalist and activist, Forbes magazine reported that dos Santos had exploited her status as Angola's first daughter on her way to amassing a fortune that the magazine then put at $3 billion.
"As best as we can trace," the story said, "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."
To counter bad news, dos Santos hired Portugal's best-known public relations consultant, Luis Paixão Martins and his firm, LPM Communication, which specialized in what it called "online reputation management," "storyselling" and "media coaching."
PR operatives touted dos Santos' business and philanthropic achievements. Dos Santos granted interviews and began to appear on panels at high-profile corporate events.
In 2015, she opened an Instagram account that would soon become her online calling card and now reaches 187,000 followers with snippets of news and homespun wisdom. That July, she posted about her latest business, a shopping mall set to open in a Luanda suburb, and said it would create 600 new jobs. She added:
"Work 😀 and build…this is how dreams are realized 😉👍."
Banks back away
As dos Santos sought to repair her reputation, the dispute with the dissident Unitel shareholder flared into the open. PT Ventures filed an arbitration complaint with the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, alleging that Unitel's Angolan shareholders had wrongly withheld board seats and dividends.
It also alleged that hundreds of millions in loans made to the dos Santos Dutch shell company were part of a "scheme to loot Unitel of its assets … for the benefit of Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola's President."
Luanda Leaks documents show dos Santos signed off on the disputed loans as both borrower and the lender. Unitel couldn't show proof that its board had approved the loans. Dos Santos' company denied the looting allegations and said all decisions were made in "the best interests of Unitel."
Increasingly excluded from the mainstream Western financial world, the dos Santos empire needed capital. Defiant, dos Santos blamed anti-African bias and vowed to build "a true African network" of banks as an alternative.
"Africa has been cut out from financial institutions," dos Santos told business students in London in 2017. "There's a lot of discrimination," she said. "We have taken upon ourselves to build these banks."
She increasingly leaned on her African network, including Banco BIC Cabo Verde. The bank, which she part-owned, helped her businesses move huge sums – and saw profits skyrocket. From 2013 to 2017, the bank turned a 1.7 million euro ($2.3 million) loss into a 12.9 million euro ($15.5 million) profit, according to ICIJ partner Finance Uncovered.
In Europe, dos Santos relied on the last bank that remained friendly to her businesses: Banco BIC Portugues (now EuroBic), in which she owned nearly half of the shares. The bank's then-chairman, Fernando Teles, was a dos Santos business partner.
When dos Santos' husband inquired about an $11.9 million loan for his de Grisogono jewellery business, Mario Silva, the couple's business manager, confirmed that the financing would be provided. He said Teles could greenlight more bank loans. Teles did not respond to requests for comment.
Eventually, Banco BIC, too, came under government scrutiny. In 2015, Portuguese central bank regulators had begun investigating allegations of self-dealing along with hundreds of "high-risk'' transactions at Banco BIC, some involving dos Santos, according to a confidential central bank report, obtained by ICIJ's Portuguese partner Expresso.
The regulators probed lax anti-money-laundering procedures, inadequate due diligence on politically exposed people — including dos Santos, her husband and her mother — and the preferential $11.9 million loan to Dokolo for de Grisogono.
They found that the bank had failed to monitor multimillion-dollar transfers out of Angola to European-based companies linked to dos Santos, her husband and associates.
"The bank's internal control system is INEXISTENT," the report concluded.
Neither dos Santos nor anyone else was ever charged with wrongdoing. In a statement to ICIJ, a spokesman for the central bank, Banco de Portugal, said regulators ordered Banco BIC to tighten procedures.
In a recent interview with a Portuguese news organization, dos Santos criticized media coverage of the bank inquiry and said she was a victim of "sensationalism."
"There's nothing in the report that mentions me," she said.
From crisis, an opportunity
The 2014 collapse of world oil prices sparked Angola's biggest economic crisis in decades. As the months dragged on, trash piled up in the streets of Luanda. Public hospitals ran out of syringes and antimalarial drugs. Women gave birth by cell phone flashlight.
Angola had used oil as collateral for loans from China to build roads and dams. Now it could no longer pay its debts, and Beijing wasn't happy. Neither were Chevron, ExxonMobil and Total, which were also owed hundreds of millions of dollars. In the past, Sonangol had come to the rescue. But costs at Angola's state oil monopoly had ballooned during the flush years. Now it was going broke.
Amid the bad news, dos Santos companies found opportunity. On September 16, 2015, nothing less than the future of Sonangol was on the agenda at a meeting Isabel dos Santos attended that included Alexandre Gorito, a Luanda-based senior partner at U.S. consulting giant Boston Consulting Group.
Boston Consulting, hired by dos Santos advisers, pitched a 52-page plan to rescue the state oil company. Working with the Lisbon-based law firm Vieira de Almeida, Boston Consulting would seek to amend government rules and laws as part of a restructuring to increase Sonangol's efficiency, Luanda Leaks documents show.
The plan included a leading role for a Maltese company, Wise Intelligence Solutions. Its only shareholders were dos Santos and her husband. The consultants and lawyers also revised a draft presidential decree creating a special government commission to oversee the Sonangol overhaul.
One month later, President dos Santos issued the decree forming the special commission. The Ministry of Finance gave Wise a $9.3 million contract to advise the panel. Wise wouldn't work alone. One of the company's accountants told dos Santos' financial advisors in an email he believed Wise did "not have the human resources and specific know-how" to deliver without subcontractors.
Wise would go on to hire Boston Consulting, along with PwC. Dos Santos later said the Angolan government asked for her help because she had international private-sector experience. The Western firms she brought in, she said, were "advisers that had worked with me in the past and that I trusted."
Under the contract, Boston Consulting would propose a new operating model for the oil company. Boston Consulting received $3.7 million from Wise, the leaked records show. PwC was paid $273,000 and Vieira de Almeida lawyers at least $490,000. It's unclear how much Wise kept.
Vieira de Almeida spokeswoman Matilde Horta e Costa told ICIJ that the law firm "takes its client intake and risk management procedures very seriously" and never advised dos Santos as an individual client.
Boston Consulting spokeswoman Nidhi Sinha told The New York Times, an ICIJ partner, that in Angola the firm "reviewed the payment structures and contracts … to ensure compliance with established policies and avoid corruption and other risks."
Grand vision
After 35 years in power, President dos Santos signalled that he would soon step down. The global oil slump and ensuing economic free fall had led to a spiral of public protests, government repression and violence. With retirement looming, the president made bold moves that would benefit his daughter.
His administration awarded an array of public works contracts, saying it hoped to boost employment and put money in the pockets of Angolans. ICIJ's reporting shows, however, that some of the main beneficiaries were Isabel dos Santos' businesses or the large or politically connected firms and banks operating with her.
In October 2015, the president officially authorized the redevelopment project he had approved one month before the Areia Branca evictions. The green light came in a presidential decree that, ICIJ documents show, his daughter's lawyers in Portugal had helped to draft.
Documents sent to her personal email account show, dos Santos reviewed bids from two Portuguese construction firms and a higher quote from a Chinese state-owned construction firm, China Road and Bridge Corp. One month later, the general director of dos Santos' construction and development company, Landscape, announced that China Road had won the job with a bid $50 million higher than the lowest bid. The Chinese company provided good financing prospects from the superpower's trade agency, according to internal emails justifying the choice.
China Road was a favoured contracting partner of the Angolan government. At the time dos Santos' company chose China Road as a business partner, it was barred from participating in any project financed by the World Bank following allegations that the company engaged in "fraudulent practices" on road construction deals in the Philippines. China Road told ICIJ the company complies with the law and opposes all forms of corruption.
When a lawyer for the cash-strapped Ministry of Finance (MoF) said it couldn't afford to cover a $232.5 million budget overrun on the project, Isabel dos Santos dealt with it personally, records show.
Replying to her project coordinator on her iPhone 30 minutes after receiving news of the possible snag, dos Santos wrote: "I don't think it's a problem, because we'll talk to the MoF right away." She would help the ministry fill the multimillion-dollar hole by spearheading a consortium of local banks or identifying other sources of funds, dos Santos wrote.
A Dutch trade agency agreed to provide credit insurance for the dredging and land reclamation part of the work, and the $1.3 billion job went forward. Urbinveste and another dos Santos company, Landscape, stood to receive about $531 million, more than 40% of the total spending. Some of that money was to be distributed to subcontractors, and it isn't clear how much Urbinveste and Landscape ultimately collected.
Dos Santos said in the BBC interview that she didn't profit from the deal. Leen Paape, a corporate governance professor at Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands, examined Luanda Leaks records at the request of ICIJ partner, Trouw.
Urbinveste's budget contained red flags, Paape said, including $100 million earmarked for project management and other unspecified costs. Such a large amount for project management, he said, "is not normal."
The redevelopment plan quickly ran aground. Today, the site of the former Areia Branca community is an empty spit of sand dotted with grass and scrub trees. Many former Areia Branca residents live less than 200 yards away in a slum littered with dead birds and rotting food and swarming with flies and mosquitos. Residents live in small huts of corrugated tin and wood, some sitting atop a mix of sewage sludge and mud that comes in at high tide. Many share beds draped in mosquito nets.
Among them: Talitha Miguel, 41, a teacher and mother of four. On a Sunday afternoon in October 2019, she sat outside her shack with three friends, baking small golden brown cakes for the market amid the sound of radios blaring popular music. Flies hovered around them. Miguel said the pushed-out residents now have no running water and only sporadic electricity. The area periodically floods, and the water surges into their houses with waste from the bay.
"In Areia Branca, life was hard, but we had a fridge, a TV," Miguel said. The houses were bigger, and they didn't flood. "We could breathe pure air," she said. "We stayed in front of the sea. We had trees. We lived healthy."
Swift exit
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