Court orders seizure of Isabel dos Santos’ assets

The Supreme Court of Angola has ordered the seizure of US$1Bn in assets held by Africa’s richest woman, Isabel dos Santos.

According to Business Insider Africa, the court order is tied to a corruption and embezzlement scandal.
The court has also ordered the freezing of the shares in all the companies in which she is a major stakeholder.
The court order for the seizure of US$1Bn of assets was issued on the request of the Angolan Public Ministry.
Jornal de Angola reports: “There are indications of embezzlement, the peddling of influence, economic participation in business and money laundering.”
The Angolan Supreme court also called for the freezing of 70% of Ms. dos Santos’ shares of Mozambique telecommunications company Mstar, and ordered the seizure of 70% of the defendant’s shares in Upstar Comunicação.
In 2020 Isabel dos Santos was named Africa’s richest woman by Forbes magazine with an estimated net worth of US$1.5Bn.
In January 2020 a cache of documents investigated by the UK’s Guardian and other partner newspapers alleged that Isabel dos Santos was not the self-made businesswoman she purported to be.
The cache, dubbed ‘The Luanda Leaks’ included 715,000 e-mails, charts, contracts, audits, and accounts that helped to illustrate how dos Santos built her billion dollar business empire.
Isabel dos Santos made her name and fortune through key roles and investments in some of Angola’s most important industries with stakes in oil, telecoms, and banking according to the Guardian.
She was also head of the Angolan State’s oil business Sonangol and was behind lucrative plans to redevelop a large area of the country’s capital Luanda.
The Luanda Leaks files were initially obtained by the anti-corruption charity Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
In Portugal Isabel dos Santos had a list of property assets including a villa at the Quinta do Lago resort in the Algarve, a luxury property on Lisbon’s A. António Augusto de Aguiar, shareholdings and interests in a raft of Portuguese companies including telecoms giant NOS (€3Bn), bank EuroBic, oil and gas company Galp among others.