Angolan businesswoman, Isabel dos Santos, is now facing fraud charges in Angola related to her time as chairwoman of state oil firm Sonangol.
Isabel dos Santos was named the first richest woman in Africa when Forbes stated that her net worth had exceeded 2 billion US dollars.
Ms. Isabel is the eldest child of Angola’s former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country from 1979 to 2017.
Attorney General of Angola, Helder Pitta Gros, has called on Isabel dos Santos to return to Angola from the UK, where she currently resides, and face potential criminal charges.
Documents that have since sprung up reveal that Africa’s richest woman made her fortune by exploiting her own country, through corruption.
When her father was president, the documents show that Isabel accessed deals involving oil, land, diamonds, and telecoms.
One such deal that seems to be suspicious involves Sonangol, where she was chairwoman from 2016 to 2017 when her father Jose Eduardo dos Santos put her in charge.
When Jose Eduardo dos Santos retired as president in September 2017, his successor sacked Isabel two months later.
Documents show that as she left Sonangol, Ms. Dos Santos approved 58 million US dollars of suspicious payments to a consultancy company in Dubai called Matter Business Solutions.
While she said that she has no financial interest in Matter Business Solutions, but the leaked documents reveal it was run by her business manager and owned by a friend.
“There is an orchestrated attack by the current government that is completely politically motivated. My holdings are commercial. There are no proceeds from public contracts or money that has been deviated from public funds,” she said when questioned on the matter by a news outlet.
What Isabel is accused of
According to prosecutors in Angola, that Isabel dos Santos and her associates owe the state over 1 billion US dollars which were acquired unscrupulously.
Pitta Gros, the Attorney General, has said that Isabel is being provisionally charged with “money laundering, influence peddling, harmful management and forgery of documents, among other economic crimes.
Five other people have been named as suspects in the case, including Mario Leite da Silva, Mr Ribeiro da Cunha, and Paula Olveira, the owner of Dubai-based consulting firm Matter Business Solutions.
Ribeiro da Cunha found dead in Lisbon
Ribeiro da Cunha, one of the five suspects named in Isabel’s fraud case was found dead in Lisbon, Portugal on Thursday, soon after Angolan prosecutors announced his name.
Nuno Ribeiro da Cunha, 45, managed the account of oil firm Sonangol, formerly chaired by Ms. Dos Santos, at the small Portuguese lender EuroBic.