Angola leaks fallout sees resignations at Nos

The chairman and two other board members linked to the Angolan entrepreneur Isabel dos Santos have resigned from telecommunications company Nos.

The information was sent to the Portuguese listed companies regulator CMVM on Thursday and is yet another company eager to rid itself of the taint of scandal and corruption form the fallout of last weekend’s Angola leaks which shocked the world.
The statement read: “Nos informs that Dr. Jorge de Brito Pereira, Dr. Mário Filipe Moreira Leite da Silva and Dr Paula Cristina Neves Oliveira today (Thursday) presented the Financial Board there respective resignations from non-executive board posts in this company”.
The three now former sleeping directors are implicated in an international investigation by journalists which revealed that Isabel dos Santos syphoned off over €100 million from Angola’s state-owned oil company Sonangol, effectively emptying its account, and re-channelling it to a shell company in Dubai operating as a company management consultancy.
A meeting was scheduled for Monday at which the three managers were to give an account of their behaviour before the company’s board of ethics.
Jorge Brito Pereira was responsible for setting up the offshore company in Dubai to which the Sonangol funds were funnelled in just a few short months.
Mário Leite da Silva is considered Isabel dos Santos’ “right hand man” in the suspected money laundering deals investigated by the BBC, Le Monde, the Guardian, Expresso and SIC TV.
In turn, Paula Oliveira, a close friend and business associate of the disgraced tycoon, ran the offshore company called Matter Business Solutions in Dubai.
On Thursday the Angolan Attorney-General made Isabel dos Santos a legal suspect to theft, fraud and money laundering and her alleged partners in crime, accused of mismanaging and misappropriation of public-owned funds.