According to recent documents obtained and published by New York-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), revealed how Africa’s richest woman and daughter of Angola former president, José Eduardo dos Santos, Isabel dos Santos, siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars of public money into offshore accounts, based on a leaked documents tagged ” leaked documents ”.
Sometimes in 2013, leading American business magazine Forbes runs an editorial feature on Isabel dos Santos, which describes her as a self-made billionaire who had risen in a male-dominated business world in an African country ravaged economy.
The Forbes editorial describes her as ” Self-Made Billionaire ”, which is what she wanted the general public to see her as, but the report by ICJ reported that she exploited family ties through her father as President of the country to by-pass tax, contract favoritism, and other illegal deals.
Who Is Isabel dos Santos?
Isabel dos Santos is an Angolan businesswoman, Africa’s richest woman and the eldest child of Angola’s former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country from 1979 to 2017. In 2013, according to Forbes, her net worth had exceeded US$2 billion making her Africa’s first female US dollar billionaire.
Forbes described how dos Santos acquired her wealth by taking stakes in companies doing business in Angola, suggesting that her wealth comes almost entirely from her family’s power and connections. In November 2015, the BBC named dos Santos as one of the 100 most influential women in the world.
Isabel dos Santos, who is known as “the princess” in Angola, the oil-rich nation her father ruled as president for almost four decades, has long denied that her estimated $2.2bn (£1.7bn) fortune is the result of nepotism or corruption.
The businesswoman, who spends much of her time in London, controls interests across Africa and Europe spanning banking, telecoms, TV, cement, diamonds, alcohol, supermarkets, and real estate.
The Luanda Leaks are based on a trove of 715,000 emails, charts, contracts, audits and accounts that were obtained initially by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), an anti-corruption charity whose work with key witnesses helped topple the South African leader Jacob Zuma. The trove was then shared with the ICIJ.
Dos Santos and her husband, the businessman and art collector Sindika Dokolo, say computers belonging to their employees and legal advisers were hacked. They say they are the subjects of a politically motivated witch-hunt led by Angola’s new president. Through their lawyers, they rejected any allegation of wrongdoing.
You can get the full report on ICJ website here.
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