Why Angola Froze the Assets of Africa’s Richest Woman Isabela Dos Santos
Hello Displorers, welcome to another informative video presented to you by Displore. In this video, we will look at why Angola froze Africa’s richest Woman’s assets, Isabel Dos Santos. To fully grasp this controversial problem, it is important that we do a little digging into the background of who Isabel Dos Santos is, how she became Africa’s richest woman and why Angola is currently not pleased with the US dollar billionaire woman.
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Background of Isabel Dos Santos
Isabel dos Santos born 20th of April 1973 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$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.
The Angolan Government has, since 2018, been trying to prosecute Isabel dos Santos for past corruption crimes that may have led to Angola's ongoing recession crisis. However, she remains in exile in Portugal. On 30 December 2019, the Luanda Provincial Court ordered the freezing of dos Santos's Angolan bank accounts and the seizure of her stake in local companies, including Unitel and Banco de Fomento Angola. Dos Santos has characterized the charges against her as “...trumped-up charges ... which were based on fabricated documents.” She describes the seizures of her assets as a "politically motivated attack". How true the charges against her are, or how true her counter accusations of her accusers are is a theory in progress.
In the meantime, she is under investigation in Portugal and has since assumed the United Arab Emirates as her official country of residence. Two weeks later, the Angolan Government announced it was preparing the legal battle for the confiscation of dos Santos's assets in Portugal, a process that is already in operation in the form of letters rogatory sent to Portugal to stop the transfer of funds from Portuguese Commercial Bank to a Russian bank. To date, one of the most famous things linked to the US dollar billionaire woman is a thing known as Luanda Leaks.
How Isabel Dos Santos Amassed Her Wealth or
Luanda Leaks
On 19 January 2020 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ published a detailed report on how dos Santos amassed her wealth over the years. The report which it called Luanda Leaks provides evidence of how she "made a fortune at the expense of the Angolan people".The night of 22 January, just days after the leaks, her personal wealth manager and private banking director Nuno Ribeiro da Cunha was found dead in the garage of his house which set numerous conspiracy theories into play.When an Angolan court froze the assets of Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman it was widely seen as the strongest signal the country’s president, Joao Lourenço’s intent on cracking down on ending corruption and decades of crony capitalism in the country.But for the 46years old Isabel dos Santos, the move is part of a concerted campaign to discredit what she often describes to journalists as the self-made success and hard work which made her a billionaire.
Why Her Assets Got Frozen
Despite cries of fowl play by Dos Santos, the Angolan court finally froze the personal bank accounts of dos Santos and her Congolese-born husband Sindika Dokolo as well as Mario da Silva, chairman of Banco de Fomento Angola, in Angola as well as their stakes in nine Angolan firms, Unitel, Angola’s telecommunications giant, BFA, and smaller ventures including the Candado supermarket chain, a cinema and a mall.An Angolan court ordered the freeze in a bid to recover more than $1billion of state funds that Ms dos Santos and associates allegedly failed to repay.The freeze dis not only affect Ms dos Santos’s large shareholdings in Uniteland Banco de Fomento Angola but also adds to a dramatic fall
