Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president and once Africa’s richest woman, has suffered a major setback in her legal battle with the Angolan government, which accuses her of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from the state.
The UK high court has ordered the freezing of £580m ($760m) of dos Santos’s assets in Britain, following a request from Unitel, an Angolan telecoms company that she co-founded and partly owned. Unitel claims that dos Santos owes it about £300m ($393m) from unpaid loans that she used to buy stakes in other telecoms firms.
Dos Santos, who lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai, denies any wrongdoing and says she is the victim of a political witch-hunt by the current Angolan president, João Lourenço, who succeeded her father José Eduardo dos Santos in 2017. She also accuses Unitel of being complicit in the Angolan government’s alleged seizure of her assets in the country.
The UK court ruling is the latest blow to dos Santos’s business empire, which has been under scrutiny since 2020, when a leak of confidential documents, known as the Luanda Leaks, revealed how she amassed her fortune through insider deals, political connections and a network of offshore companies. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which led the investigation, estimated that dos Santos and her associates had siphoned off more than $1 billion from Angola’s public coffers.
Since then, dos Santos has faced criminal investigations and asset freezes in Angola, Portugal, and the Netherlands, where some of her companies are based. She has also been barred from entering the United States, citing “significant corruption”. In November 2022, Interpol issued a warrant for her arrest, at the request of the Angolan authorities.
Dos Santos, who holds Russian and Angolan citizenship, has challenged some of the legal actions against her, claiming that they are based on fabricated evidence and violate her human rights. She has also launched a counter-suit against Unitel, seeking $5 billion in damages for alleged breaches of contract and fiduciary duties.
However, her chances of winning her cases seem slim, as more evidence of her alleged corruption emerges. In October 2023, a BBC investigation revealed that dos Santos had paid a $100 million bribe to a former Portuguese minister to secure a lucrative contract for her husband’s company in Angola. The minister, Manuel Pinho, was arrested in Portugal and faces charges of corruption, money laundering, and tax fraud.
Dos Santos’s downfall has been seen as a symbol of the anti-corruption drive by President Lourenço, who has vowed to end the culture of impunity and nepotism that plagued Angola under his predecessor. Lourenço has also pledged to diversify the oil-dependent economy and attract foreign investment to the country, which is still recovering from a decades-long civil war that ended in 2002.
Despite the challenges, some analysts and activists are optimistic that Angola is on the right track to reform and development. Rafael Marques, a prominent Angolan journalist and human rights defender, who has exposed dos Santos’s corruption for years, told the BBC: “This is a historic moment for Angola. It shows that no one is above the law and that justice can be done.”
Source: The Guardian
