LAST DECEMBER Isabel dos Santos commemorated her tenth
wedding anniversary to Congolese businessman Sindika Dokolo with a party.
Subtlety wasn’t on the menu. She jetted in dozens of friends and relatives from
as far as Germany and Brazil, who joined with hundreds of local guests in
Angola for three days of lavishness, including a bash at the Fortress of Sao
Miguel in the capital city of Luanda and a beachside Sunday brunch on the posh
Mussulo peninsula. The invitation, according to one attendee, came in a sleek
white box, promising a celebration of “a decade of passion/ a decade of
friendship/ a decade worth a hundred years. …”
A decade worth $3 billion is more like it. At 40 Dos Santos
is Africa’s only female billionaire, and also the continent’s youngest. She has
quickly and systematically garnered significant stakes in Angola’s strategic
industries–banking, cement, diamonds and telecom–making her the most
influential businessperson in her homeland. More than half of her assets are
held in publicly traded Portuguese companies, adding international credibility.
When FORBES outed her as a billionaire in January the government disseminated
the news as a matter of national pride, living proof that this country of 19
million has arrived.
The real story, however, is how Dos Santos–the oldest
daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos–acquired her wealth. For
the past year FORBES has been tracing Isabel dos Santos’ path to riches,
reviewing a score of documents and speaking with dozens of people on the
ground. As best as we can trace, every major Angolan investment held by Dos
Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business
in the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the
action. Her story is a rare window into the same, tragic kleptocratic narrative
that grips resource-rich countries around the world.
For President Dos Santos it’s a foolproof way to extract
money from his country, while keeping a putative arm’s-length distance away. If
the 71-year-old president gets overthrown, he can reclaim the assets from his
daughter. If he dies in power, she keeps the loot in the family. Isabel may
decide, if she is generous, to share some of it with her seven known
half-siblings. Or not. The siblings are known around Angola for despising one
another.
How Forbes' Estimate Of Isabel Dos Santos' Fortune Grew
From $500M to $3B In Less Than A Year
“It is not
possible to justify this wealth, which is shamelessly displayed,” former
Angolan prime minister Marcolino Moco tells FORBES. “There is no doubt that it
was the father who generated such a fortune.”
Isabel dos Santos declined to speak with FORBES for this
article. Her representatives failed to respond to detailed questions sent
months ago but last week issued this statement: “Mrs. Isabel dos Santos is an
independent business woman, and a private investor representing solely her own
interests. Her investments in Angolan and/or in Portuguese companies are
transparent and have been conducted through arms-length transactions involving
external entities such as reputed banks and law firms.” In turn, the spokesman
accuses this article’s coauthor, an Angolan investigative journalist, of being
an activist with a political agenda. The Angolan government jailed Marques de
Morais in 1999 over a series of articles critical of the regime and has brought
new criminal defamation charges against him over his 2011 book, Blood Diamonds:
Corruption and Torture in Angola .
Finally, a representative of Mrs. Dos Santos said that
any allegations of illegal wealth transfers between her and the government are
“groundless and completely absurd.” That could well be. When your father runs
the show, and can dictate which national assets are sold and at what price,
what’s theft of public resources in one country can be rendered legal with a
swipe of the pen.
President José Eduardo dos Santos could not be reached
for comment. That is unfortunate, because the Dos Santoses, as Moco notes, have
“some explaining to do.”
FOR THREE CENTURIES the Portuguese extracted wealth from
this mineral-rich country on Africa’s southwestern coast. Almost immediately
after Angola won independence in 1975, various internal factions began battling
one another for the right to do the exact same thing. From this chaos, which
lasted 27 years, Dos Santos, who had studied oil engineering in Soviet
Azerbaijan and served as foreign minister upon independence, eventually emerged
as president in 1979. He’s held on to power ever since, making him the planet’s
third-longest-serving nonroyal head of state.
The president met his first wife (he’s been married at
least twice), Tatiana Kukanova, while a student in Azerbaijan, and his first
child–Isabel–was born there. By age 6 Isabel dos Santos was in Angola’s
presidential palace, and while the family’s lifestyle wasn’t over-the-top by
profligate African dictator standards (save the president’s dalliances–at least
five of his children are from various mistresses), the family had Christmas
trees flown in from New York and $500,000 worth of bubbly imported from a
Lisbon restaurateur. There was decadence enough for Isabel to earn the nickname
“the Princess.”
During Isabel’s upbringing the Angola economy sputtered,
crippled by two factors: ongoing civil war and Dos Santos’ socialist policies.
“In the 1980s you’d go to the supermarket and there would only be noodles on
the shelves. There wasn’t much there,” says University of Southern California
associate professor emeritus Gerald Bender, who’s been studying Angola since
1968. For cloistered Isabel that reality was likely invisible; she eventually
attended King’s College in London, where her mother, now a British citizen,
lives, and earned an undergraduate degree in engineering.
However, as civil war resumed by the end of 1992, Isabel
left for Angola’s capital city, Luanda, in a rush, allegedly after receiving
death threats in London.
By the late 1990s, when the civil war was winding down –a
ceasefire was formally declared in 2002–President Dos Santos, like the Soviets
he had studied under in the 1960s, was embracing a grab-what-you-can form of
capitalism. Over the past decade Angola has been one of the world’s
fastest-growing economies. GDP grew at an 11.6% annual clip from 2002 to 2011,
driven by a more than doubling of oil production to 1.8 million barrels a day.
The government budget sits at $69 billion, up from $6.3 billion a decade ago.
But predictably, precious little of the windfall has made
it to the people. Some 70% of Angolans live on less than $2 a day. And by the
government’s own count, 10% of the country’s population is scrambling for food
due to drought and bureaucratic neglect. So where’s the money going? Start with
a paranoid president-for-life. The state security apparatus sucks more funds
from the budget than health care, education and agriculture combined. A lot is
clearly stolen: Between 2007 and 2010 at least $32 billion of oil revenue went
missing from the federal ledger, according to the International Monetary Fund,
which later tracked most of the money to “quasi-fiscal operations.” Angola
comes in at 157 out of 176 nations ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index. It trails shining stalwarts of participatory democracy such
as Yemen and Kyrgyzstan. And it’s within this environment that Isabel dos
Santos has surfaced with an estimated net worth of $3 billion.
Called from FORBES
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