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In 1999, Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais wrote an article titled "The Lipstick of Dictatorship" in which he denounced then-President José Eduardo dos Santos as corrupt. For his writing, he was arrested, held in solitary confinement, denied food and charged with defamation.
"I was jailed for that, went on trial for that, and went through hell for exposing corruption at the presidential level," he told VOA.
Today, as members of the dos Santos family have more than $1 billion in assets frozen and face charges of financial crimes, he feels vindicated. He says his fight to expose corruption was worth it.
"It's a long-overdue measure by the judicial authorities because Isabel dos Santos and the dos Santos family are at the top of the pyramid of those who have plundered the country," he said.
A light on dos Santos family
Marques has spent more than two decades chronicling corruption in his home country, with a particular emphasis on the diamond industry.
He has received numerous awards for his work including a Hellman/Hammett grant by Human Rights Watch in 2011. His initiative Maka Angola supports and publishes crusading, investigative journalism in the country.
Marques said throughout his career he has tried to shine a light on the systematic looting of Angola's wealth by members of the dos Santos family.
In December, a court accused the former president's daughter, Isabel dos Santos, and her husband of causing the state to incur more than $1 billion in losses through a scheme that involved two state-owned companies transferring foreign currency abroad and never being repaid.
Isabel dos Santos has been referred to as Africa's richest woman, with ownership interest in a mobile phone company, banks, cable television and a supermarket chain. In 2018, her brother, José Filomeno dos Santos, was arrested and accused of trying to steal $500 million. He is facing a trial before the Supreme court.
Marques said that for years former President dos Santos published decrees announcing the transfer of state assets to his own family and friends.
"The evidence was always there," he said. "There was in Angola what I called in my thesis 'the transparency of looting.' So it was right in the people's face. It was evident there was not much effort in trying to hide the way President dos Santos was dolling out state resources, state funds, public state bank loans to his own children."
Will she return to face charges?
Isabel dos Santos and her husband live abroad. Although Angola's attorney general has demanded that they return to the country to face charges, it is unclear if they will. Marques says he hopes they have their day in court.
"When her father was in power as a dictator, I had seven people coming to arrest me at my house, pointing seven guns at me, and the whole neighbourhood was besieged," he said.
"I didn't run away. I didn't leave the country. I stood up to her father, a dictator, who had the mighty power, and that was in this country. I never fled. Why hasn't she come back to defend herself?"
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 😉👍."
Isabel dos Santos and her father
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.
While Isabel dos Santos partied away with other billionaires using state funds, many Angolans lived impoverished lives
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
From her seat in the VIP section, dos Santos watched as her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, walked a red carpet in Luanda's Republic Square. In September 2017, he handed over power at the inauguration of his handpicked successor, João Lourenço.
A former defense minister, Lourenço took office with a vow to tackle corruption. The dos Santos era was rapidly coming to a close.
Inside Sonangol, the scramble began. On November 7, 2017, two months after Lourenço's inauguration, the head of Sonangol's subsidiary in the United Kingdom learned that she was about to be replaced.
Maria Sandra Lopes Julio, chief of Sonangol's UK unit, said she was sitting in her office when Sonangol's CFO, Raikundalia, walked in.
"He began by informing me that the Board of Directors of Sonangol EP had decided on my resignation, as part of the ongoing transformation process, and that I would be replaced by Mrs. Maria Rodrigues," Julio wrote in a five-page letter to Angola's petroleum minister.
Julio wrote that Raikundalia told her that she wasn't being terminated for incompetence. In fact, he praised her performance.
"I couldn't help but be amazed," Julio wrote.
Three days after Julio's dismissal, Sonangol signed a contract for consulting services with Matter Business Solutions, the Dubai company owned by dos Santos' business partner, Paula Oliveira. Signing for Sonangol: The new U.K. chief, Rodrigues. Oliveira signed for Matter.
The signatures cleared the way for a massive payment to the consulting firm in Dubai.
In a telephone interview, Rodrigues told ICIJ that she had worked at Sonangol since the early 2000s. Her brother married, then divorced, a sister of José Eduardo dos Santos before he became president.
Rodrigues said that she remembers signing only one document during her short stint as Sonangol's U.K. chief, though she doesn't recall the subject, and that Sonangol CFO Raikundalia brought the document to London and asked her to sign. Rodrigues said she doesn't know Oliveira.
The contract stipulated that Sonangol would pay for past and future services provided by Matter. Five days later, on November 15, 2017, President Lourenço fired Isabel dos Santos as head of Sonangol.
The Angolan news agency reported the firing on a Wednesday at 1.31 p.m. At 6:30 pm that same day, Sonangol asked its Portuguese bankers to pay $38 million to the bank account of Matter Business Solutions. The transaction details appear on a payment order shared by dos Santos with the news agency Lusa. Dos Santos said she approved the transfer order before her dismissal.
Oliveira said the last-minute invoicing was an attempt to have accounts settled, "once Matter discovered what had happened regarding Ms. dos Santos, coupled with cash-flow issues that were occurring at Sonangol."
In all, confidential Songangol records reviewed by ICIJ show, the oil company's bank executed three payments worth about $58 million to Matter Business Solutions on the day after the president announced her dismissal, November 16.
Three months later, dos Santos' successor at Sonangol, Carlos Saturnino, held a five-hour press conference and accused her of mismanagement. He said her tenure, which lasted less than 18 months, had been marked by improper business practices — including excessive compensation, conflict of interest, tax avoidance and an excessive number of consultants.
Saturnino alleged that dos Santos had approved upward of $135 million in consulting fees, with most of those fees going to the Dubai consulting company.
He identified 13 companies that had been paid for consulting services, including five with ties to dos Santos. Four others were her trusted advisers: the Lisbon law firm Vieira de Almeida and the global consulting giants PwC, Boston Consulting and McKinsey & Company.
Saturnino didn't respond to repeated requests for comment by ICIJ and partners. Dos Santos said in a recent interview that the payments were for legitimate services that consultants had already delivered.
She also offered a detailed response in a 10-page letter to Saturnino. Dos Santos wrote that when she was still head of Sonangol, its board approved the contract to the Dubai company, Matter Business Solutions.
Matter Business had been responsible for managing consultants for the Sonangol restructuring, she said, adding that she had no connection to the firm. Dos Santos said she abstained from voting on the contract "to ensure no conflict of interest."
Through her lawyers, Oliveira told ICIJ that dos Santos "has no legal or management role in Matter whatsoever" and that she is not an owner.
"The fees paid to Matter for their consultancy services were legitimately occurred and fully recorded in Matter's audited account," the lawyers said. "Any allegations that Matter or Ironsea were involved in (or set up to facilitate) the embezzlement of funds from Sonangol is patently false."
In the weeks and months after the firing, dos Santos proclaimed her innocence on Twitter and Instagram. She denied ever engaging in favouritism or receiving improper payments.
"It's nothing but a circus, a performance," she said in the interview with the Lusa news agency.
She dismissed unflattering stories as "fake news," called billing allegations unfounded and blamed her predecessor at Sonangol for overspending.
"I like to think that I have responsibility for the breadwinners of many families," she said. "We worked at Sonangol with a sense of mission, with a spirit to save the company, and we did it."
In March 2018, Angolan prosecutors opened a preliminary probe, and a court issued a summons for dos Santos to appear for questioning in July.
She didn't appear. She claims she didn't receive the request.
Under siege
Dos Santos' entire business empire was under siege. The arbitration panel at the International Chamber of Commerce ordered Unitel, which she co-owned with Sonangol, to pay its Portuguese shareholder, PT Ventures, more than $650 million for breach of contract. Her lawyers told ICIJ that the arbitration court found the controversial loans to her shell company caused "no damage." The ruling is confidential.
President Lourenço cancelled her public works contracts, including the Luanda redevelopment plan. Angolan authorities said they uncovered overpayments and other irregularities such as phony invoices, noncompetitive bidding and improper subcontracting.
Angola's state diamond-trading company severed ties to dos Santos, and her diamond exploration licences were revoked. The head of the state diamond company, Eugénio Pereira Bravo da Rosa, told ICIJ partners that its investment in Dokolo's luxury jewellery business was a financial disaster. The company expects losses on the deal to exceed $200 million, Bravo da Rosa said.
Pressed by ICIJ, Angolan officials last month released more than 400 pages of documents from Sonangol about dos Santos' business activities, including emails and financial records and invoices submitted by Matter Business.
In responses through lawyers, dos Santos questioned the veracity of documents ICIJ reviewed. Last year, the day before Christmas, dos Santos said, she got news from a group on WhatsApp. A court in Angola had frozen her personal bank accounts, those of her husband and her stakes in some of the country's largest companies, including phone provider Unitel.
The government said the couple and Silva, the financial adviser, were suspected of causing Angola to lose more than $1 billion through business deals gone awry. According to investigators, Portuguese police intercepted $11 million that dos Santos tried to transfer to Russia.
Dos Santos called the allegations false and vowed a legal fight. Angolan prosecutors say they are collaborating with authorities in the U.S., U.K., Switzerland, Brazil, Portugal and Congo. They say the intricacy of dos Santos' shell empire is making the job difficult. So far, they have uncovered 31 companies with links to dos Santos outside Angola, prosecutors said.
ICIJ found many more. Since 1992, dos Santos and her husband have created or invested in at least 400 companies and subsidiaries in 41 countries, an ICIJ review found. Ninety four of these companies are registered in secrecy jurisdictions, including Dubai, Mauritius and the British Virgin Islands, ICIJ found.
'It's Armageddon'
Many companies and executives who did business with dos Santos declined to say anything about their relationships with her.
After receiving detailed questions from ICIJ and its partner the BBC, accounting giant PwC said it planned to terminate its relationship with dos Santos family businesses.
Van Oord said it learned of the 2013 evictions only after questions from ICIJ partners Trouw and Het Financieele Dagblad. The families were removed before the company's involvement in the project. It promised to "use its leverage" with the Angolan government and contractors to ensure compensation.
Angolan authorities have identified only Isabel dos Santos, her husband and Silva as criminal suspects.
In voicemail messages left with an ICIJ reporter, Welwitschea dos Santos denied any financial link to Isabel or her father. She accused President Lourenço of getting her kicked out of Parliament, and she has appealed the decision. "I believe none of the sides are right," she said.
José Filomeno de Sousa did not respond to a letter seeking comment, nor did Isabel dos Santos' top lieutenant, Silva. Her lawyer, Brito Pereira, also didn't respond.
Her husband, Dokolo, denied using offshore entities to improperly avoid taxation. He blamed the new government for his and his wife's problems. Dokolo said through his lawyer the couple had been the victim of a hacking attack and that ICIJ's questions may be based on forged documents.
"It's Armageddon," Dokolo told Radio France Internationale. "The regime claims to act in the name of the fight against corruption, but it does not attack the agents of public companies accused of embezzlement, just a family operating in the private sector," he said.
No Western company has been accused of any wrongdoing in the Angolan government's investigation. Isabel dos Santos' father has also not been named.
The current president, João Lourenço, did not respond to allegations that he is conducting a "witch hunt" against the dos Santos family. Lourenço also did not comment on criticisms that his administration hasn't done enough to fight corruption.
Isabel dos Santos continues to insist that she made all her money during her father's rule solely by "taking risks and hard work."
President Lourenço's government, she says, is seeking to undermine "the legacy of President dos Santos and what he has achieved."
"There is an orchestrated attack by the current government that is completely politically motivated," she said in the BBC interview.
The family says it no longer feels at home in Angola. José Eduardo dos Santos lives in a heavily guarded, walled compound in an upscale neighborhood of Barcelona. Isabel has moved back to London, where her children attend school.
Dos Santos says that she can't go back because she fears for her safety and that she remains committed to Angola. In interviews with British and Portuguese media outlets, she emphasized that her companies are among the country's biggest taxpayers and employ thousands. She told Bloomberg News that she worries the asset freeze could doom her companies.
Until her recent legal struggles, dos Santos often shuttled between Lisbon and London while attending conferences in New York, Russia and China. This month, dos Santos was scheduled to attend a gathering of the global elite, the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Unitel is a partner.
Last week, the Forum said she would not be attending.
Article republished with slight edits from International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Bya PATRICK KIBIRANGO ne LAWRENCE MUKASA ABATUUZE b'e Namungoona baalabye katemba omukozi ne mukama we bwe beerangidde ebisongonvu lwa kumugoba ku mulimu n'agamba nti, kino kyavudde ku kugaana kuganza...
The Constitutional court has adjourned indefinitely passing judgement in the case in which businessman Hassan Basajjabalaba was dragged over his Shs 142 billion compensation.
This is the fourth time the panel of five Constitutional court judges led by Kenneth Kakuru has failed to deliver their ruling. The other justices on the panel include Elizabeth Musoke, Geoffrey Kiryabwire, Stephen Musota and Cheborion Barishaki.
Kakuru said today Thursday that the case file is huge and new submissions, which he didn't reveal, keep emerging even when the judgement is ready. He explained that once they are satisfied with the harmonization of the issues, they will be delivering it on notice instead of working under too much pressure.
However, a lawyer who was in court and preferred anonymity alleges that the judges must be doctoring something in the verdict, arguing that it's rare for the Constitutional court to send judgement notices to parties like they did when indeed the judgement is not ready.
The case arises from October 2010 and April 2011, when Basajjabalaba and his five companies using guarantees issued by the Bank of Uganda obtained $65 million (about Shs 238 billion) from four commercial banks including United Bank of Africa (UBA), Orient bank, Bank of Baroda and Tropical bank but failed to pay back the loan.
Basajjabalaba had been guaranteed the loans in question on allegations that he demanded government money in form of compensation to cater for losses caused to him as a result of the cancellation of contracts he had signed with the defunct Kampala City Council (KCC) to develop several city markets.
The businessman was reportedly meant to manage and develop markets including Shauriyako, Nakivubo, Nakawa and the Constitutional Square, but the same contract had allegedly been entered without the advice of the attorney general.
Following this, a committee was set up to verify Basajjabalaba's claims against the government and it was found that his claim was worth only Shs 54.7 billion and not Shs 142 billion as he claimed. However, Basajjabalaba was not satisfied with the money and thus appealed to President Yoweri Museveni who also directed the then-attorney general Prof Khiddu Makubuya to handle the matter expeditiously.
Makubuya suggested that Basajjabalaba gets a compensation of Shs 142.7 billion and Shs 29.9 billion for the Nakawa market. Legal Brains Trust challenged the procedure leading to the compensation, citing that it was fraudulent and demanded that Basajjabalaba and 19 other respondents refund the money in question.
The petitioner argued that the respondents conspired to commit corruption since the transactions were erroneously made. However, Basajjabalaba and his companies through their lawyers led by Caleb Alaka told court that the compensation was lawful since it was sanctioned by both parliament and the then Finance minister.
