Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of the Angolan former president and the richest woman in Africa, is said to have enriched herself with Angolan state property. That has been determined by the Netherlands Arbitration Institute. And so she has to repay no less than 422 million euros.
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In 2006, dos Santos, with a fortune of 3.5 billion dollars, illegally acquired 422 million euros in shares in the Portuguese oil group Galp. And she now has to give that back to the state oil company Sonangol. That reports The Financial Times that received a copy of the ruling.
She would have acquired six percent of those shares through the investment vehicle Exem Energy, a mailbox company registered on a business park near Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. Exem Energy borrowed $75 million from Sonangol for this, but that money was never returned. Although dos Santos always denied that such a transaction had taken place, it now appears that her signature is on all documents of those transactions. A transaction that was also facilitated by her father who, as head of state of Angola, could get the ‘loan’ more easily.
Due to the verdict, dos Santos has lost most of her assets. Because in 2019 she was already convicted by a court in Angola, which frozen millions of other assets. In 2020, the court in Portugal again took the decision to confiscate millions. And it doesn’t stop there, because criminal investigations into the woman are still ongoing in both the Netherlands and Portugal.
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