By Simon Allison
“The world is still
full of prejudice,” said Isabel dos Santos, speaking to a receptive audience at
the London School of Economics in 2017. By then she was already Africa’s
richest woman, worth more than $2-billion, but she wanted the audience to know
that she hadn’t always had it easy. “Either you are too young to do something.
Or too smart and too privileged. Or then you are a girl, you are the wrong
gender.”
The
key to surmounting these obstacles, she said, was self-belief. “You mustn’t
lose focus on who you are, your identity. Your identity is key. You have to
believe in yourself to fight all kinds of discrimination.”
As
she spun her oft-told story, Dos Santos got one thing right: identity really is
the key. Never more so than for the daughter of one of Africa’s longest-serving
presidents, whose vast wealth is linked directly to the enormous power her
family wielded over an oil-rich country.
On
Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and partner
publications released information from a trove of documents — the Luanda Leaks
— leaked by someone at the heart of Dos Santos Business Empire. And what an
empire it is: more than 400 companies in 41 countries are linked to Dos Santos
or her husband, Sindika Dokolo. These include banks, telecoms companies, media
organisations and shell companies in tax havens.
The
story that Dos Santos tells about herself — a story echoed over the years in
too many flattering, uncritical profiles engineered by a sophisticated
publicity operation — is that of a smart, driven, self-made entrepreneur. As
she told another London audience in 2017: “I’ve been managing companies for a
long time, starting them from small, building them up, going through every
single stage of what it takes for a company to be successful.”
Although
there is no doubt that Dos Santos is both smart and driven — can you imagine either of the Mugabe boys managing a
corporate empire, no matter how many contracts were handed to them? — this was
never the real secret of her success.
As
the ICIJ reported: “Left
unmentioned in London: That she had been installed in the top job at Sonangol
by her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, the long-time Angolan autocrat. That
over the years he had awarded her companies public contracts, tax breaks,
telecom licenses and diamond-mining rights. And that even as she spoke to the
crowd of aspiring entrepreneurs, she was paving the way for one of her most
brazen insider deals — the payment of tens of millions of dollars from the
state oil monopoly to a company in Dubai controlled by her business partner.”
This
extensive reporting makes it abundantly clear that Isabel dos Santos did not
create her own wealth. If these allegations are to be relied on, then she stole
it.
Dos
Santos has vehemently denied the allegations. “The ICIJ report is based on many
fake documents and false information, it is a coordinated political attack in coordination
with the ‘Angolan Government’. 715 thousand documents read? Who believes that?
#icij #lies,” she tweeted.
Dos
Santos stuck to her old story. “I build companies and enterprises, I invest and
create jobs. This where my wealth comes from: BUSINESSES.”
But
the truth is that these allegations are not new, but build on years of
investigative journalism that has repeatedly exposed “Africa’s richest woman”
as a fraud. No one with even a cursory understanding of Angolan politics could
be under any illusion that dos Santos’s money was clean. This very newspaper
called it as early as 2012, describing Isabel dos Santos and her
brother, José Filomeno — then head of Angola’s sovereign wealth fund — as
“heirs to a private business empire called Angola”.
As
D Qaresma dos Santos [no relation] wrote earlier
this month for Maka Angola, the award-winning investigative
journalism unit that has done more than any other publication in exposing
corruption at the heart of the Dos Santos regime: “For years, evidence had made
its way into the public domain showing that Isabel Dos Santos’s entire business
empire was built on privileged access to Angolan state funds, including seed
money ‘lent’ to her by Angola’s state oil company, Sonangol, which was never
repaid.”
Exposing
this evidence came at great risk to whistle-blowers, and great personal cost to
Maka Angola’s founder and editor, Rafael Marques de Morais: “It was Rafael
Marques who constantly faced politically motivated harassment, arrest, ill
treatment, imprisonment and threats against his life,” D Qaresma dos Santos
added.
But
while Marques and others were risking their lives to expose corruption on a
global scale, a network of Western firms were — once again — using their vast
expertise to facilitate the looting of the state.
All
four of the big accounting firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — did work for
Dos Santos companies. PwC played the biggest role, helping set up companies in
Malta, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and offering “creative” advice on how
to avoid taxes. Two of the big consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group and
McKinsey — both of whom continued to work with the government of Saudi Arabia,
even after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — made millions by offering
strategic advice to Dos Santos-linked entities.
This
work continued even after major banks — including Barclays, Citibank, Deutsche
Bank and Santander — cut ties to the Dos Santos empire, over concerns about the
source of the money. In other words: the likes of PwC, McKinsey and Boston
Consulting knew exactly what they were signing up for, and chose to proceed
anyway. They are complicit.
Angola
has said it is pushing for the extradition of Isabel dos Santos to face charges
at home. There is no doubt that this would be a big win for new president João
Lourenco and his much-publicised anti corruption drive; and, in that sense, Dos
Santos may not be far wrong when she describes the release of the evidence
against her as a “coordinated political attack”.
That
does not invalidate this evidence, however, which shows conclusively how the
Dos Santos family looted the state they were supposed to be governing — and how
Western firms helped them every step of the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment