Santos Isabel

Santos Isabel

Biography

Born in Baku in 1973 in the family of the Angolan revolutionary and future president of Angola (1979-2017) Jose Eduardo dos Santos and a native of Penza Tatyana Kukanova.

According to OCCRP, a group of Angolan officials and bank governors have set up their own private banking network to withdraw money to Portugal and other EU countries. Thanks to this system in 2002-2017. at least 324 million dollars were withdrawn abroad, another 257 million were received by European companies associated with these people. The Money Pipeline was exposed back in 2016, but never made public.

Among the participants in shadow operations are the companies of the presidential daughter and citizen of the Russian Federation Isabel dos Santos and a number of other top functionaries closely associated with the oil state-owned company Sonangol, which accounts for 75% of the income of the Angolan treasury. The architects of the "pipeline" were former Vice President Manuel Vicente and his business partner - millionaire Leopoldina Fragos do Nacimento. It was he who turned Sonangol into an opaque network of over 70 subsidiaries on four continents.

In January 2019, the media reported that Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa, the first female billionaire on the continent and the daughter of Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, received Russian citizenship, which will help her avoid extradition to Angola from the UAE.

However, in a telephone conversation, when asked by a TASS journalist, Isabel replied that she was a Russian woman by birth and always had a Russian passport.

She married the Congolese businessman Sindik Dokolo, a collector and philanthropist who owed her fortune to her father, a high-ranking Zairian functionary. It was Dokolo who worked thoroughly on the image of dos Santos, creating the legend of self-made woman, who made a thorny path from street egg trading to designer handbags, luxury real estate, the Swiss jewelry company De Grisogono and an honorary place in the Forbes ranking with a personal fortune of $3 billion.

She owned the banks Banco BIC and Banco BPI.

However, the Angolan prosecutor's office has a slightly different opinion about the origin of its assets, and in unison the voices of ordinary compatriots who reproduce memes about Isabel surrounded by golden eggs sound to the justice authorities. The thing is that in 2016-2017 Isabel headed the strategic state oil company Sonangol Group, but after being dismissed from this post as a result of a series of anti-corruption purges, she prudently left the country and is in Dubai for 2020.

On December 31, 2019, the Luanda Provincial Court, at the request of the National Asset Recovery Service, arrested Isabeli and her husband's companies and accounts. According to the prosecutor's office, the activities of this couple damaged the Angolan economy in the amount of $1.36 billion.

The participation of the PWC unit in the schemes of illegal enrichment of the Dos Santos family caused the resignation of the head of the PWC unit, which oversees Portugal and Angola.

Projects with Van Oord

The Dutch group Van Oord, which is one of the largest marine engineering companies in the world, is suspected of violating human rights and paying bribes in Angola in January 2020. The bank ING and the Dutch deposit insurance agency Atradis were also involved in the project. ING issued a loan for the project in the amount of €360 million, and Atradis insured this amount.

Van Oord, along with the daughter of the former Angolan president, Russian citizen Isabel dos Santos, took part in an urban development project near Luanda, in which 3,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes. The army and police cut off food for a week and left locals with little to no access to drinking water. They beat people, used tear gas and water cannons. A week later, all residents left the area where construction was to begin and found themselves homeless. Many of them still live in squalid conditions as the Angolan government has not paid compensation or provided them with new housing.

Attempt to sell Unitel Angola to Russians

Some of her assets have been seized in Angola and Europe, and she is rushing to sell the rest. The deal to sell the most expensive asset - a stake in the mobile operator Unitel Angola - was offered to lend to Sberbank and the British company Gemcorp Capital, owned by Atanas Bostandzhiev, a former director of VTB Capital. In the materials of the Portuguese court, there is information that Isabel Dos Santos tried to sell the company controlling the Angolan cellular company Unitel Angola to Russia, but the Portuguese authorities blocked a transaction of 10 million euros from one of its business partners in Russia.

2021: US sanctions

In December 2021, the US authorities imposed sanctions on the richest woman in Africa, Isabel Dos Santos, as part of the Magnitsky Act. Her assets in US banks will be frozen and banned from entering.