Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s first female billionaire, denies the international charges that she looted her fortune from Angola, the nation her father ruled for 38 years. So why does she appear to be hiding from justice in Dubai? She makes her case to Christina Lamb.
The private marina is full of superyachts. The car park purrs and growls with Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis. Cristiano Ronaldo is posting on Instagram from the gym. In the restaurant a mobile ringtone sounds the distinctive opening chords of the Succession theme tune. As gilded cages go, they don’t get much shinier.
This is the Bulgari Resort on Dubai’s Jumeirah Bay — a man-made island the shape of a seahorse. Known as Billionaires’ Island, it is said to have more billionaires per square mile than anywhere in the United Arab Emirates. The perfect place, then, for Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s first female billionaire — and as she sweeps into reception in a white broderie anglaise dress and white Chanel mules, hair swinging in expensive curls, she looks at home.
Normally at this time of year dos Santos would be setting off for the Davos economic summit. In May it would be the Cannes film festival, where she has hung out with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio, or perhaps a jaunt on her superyacht to her apartment in Monaco.
Instead the 50-year-old is on Interpol’s red notice list, her assets expropriated or frozen worldwide by courts in London, Luanda, Lisbon and Amsterdam, and she is banned from entry to the US. She stands accused of amassing an estimated £1.7 billion ($3.5 billion) fortune at the expense of the Angolan people, using the influence of her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, who was president of the oil and diamond-rich southwest African country for 38 years. Some have described it as a textbook case of how to loot a country.
She claims it’s a political witch-hunt by her father’s successor. She is so broke, she says, that friends are paying her rent and restaurant bills, and her designer dresses are ten years old. It is not only material possessions and freedom to travel she has lost. Her Congolese husband, Sindika Dokolo, who was also accused, died in October 2020 in a diving accident in Dubai, which she intimates was the result of foul play. Her father died aged 79 in exile in Spain in 2022. Now, after four years of accusations, she has decided to speak out.
We talk over two days, including a photoshoot for which she changes outfit five times, switching between Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Prada. I find her alone apart from a housekeeper in her apartment at the Bulgari Residences. Her four children — the youngest of whom is only six — have returned to the UK after staying with her for Christmas.
The three boys are at private schools in London and live with nannies and bodyguards at her mansion in South Kensington near the Albert Hall, one of three London homes estimated to be collectively worth £25 million ($52 million). The eldest, a daughter of 19, is at Edinburgh University.
An elder boy of Dokolo’s from a previous relationship is also in the UK — “studying and doing delivery for Uber Eats”. “I miss them,” she shrugs. “But I want them to be educated in the UK and don’t want to mess with their education. Hopefully this will all be over soon and I can join them.” Dos Santos herself is an alumnus of the prestigious British girls’ school St Paul’s and a graduate of King’s College London.
We speak in English — one of six languages she speaks fluently. She constantly checks her phone. “I am very bored,” she admits. “What I am good at is building businesses. But now I spend most of my time dealing with lawyers.”
The woman who once ran the biggest private empire in Angola, encompassing telecoms, diamonds, media, banking, a brewery, supermarkets and a nightclub —as well as owning significant shares in banks and a comunications giant in Portugal — now spends her days posting glamorous selfies and inspirational messages to her followers: 555,000 on Instagram and 1.5 million on TikTok. “Open the door to your destiny,” she posts with a photo of herself in that white dress, literally opening a door at the end of our first day together.
Her own destiny took a nosedive after her father stepped down before elections in September 2017, naming General João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, his defence minister, as presidential candidate for the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
After her father, by now in poor health, went into exile, Lourenço’s government began trying to prosecute his daughter and son-in-law over allegations of corruption — claiming it was owed £800 million ($1.6 billion) by the couple. After freezing their bank accounts and assets they accused dos Santos and Dokolo of embezzlement and money laundering in January 2020.
That same month an investigation led by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published Luanda Leaks — 715,000 documents that revealed how the couple allegedly used the state as “their personal piggy bank”, siphoning off state funds through a financial web of 400 offshore businesses and shell companies across the world. “Isabel dos Santos made a fortune at the expense of the Angolan people,” the investigation concluded.
Since 2020 Portuguese prosecutors have filed 17 criminal cases. Last June a Dutch court ruled she had diverted millions from the state oil company, Sonangol, to a firm she co-owned with her husband. In December the High Court in London granted a worldwide freezing order on her assets in a case brought by Unitel, the Angolan telecommunications company she founded. The court approved a spending limit of £15,000 ($31,000) a week for herself and £5,000 ($10,000) a week for each of her five children’s living expenses, plus another £50,000 ($103,000) a year per child for their education — £2.3 million ($4.7 million) a year in total for what the judge described as her “pretty prodigious spending habit”. She insists: “All my accounts are frozen meaning I have no access to any funds whatsoever.”
Last month Angola’s public prosecutor issued 12 criminal charges including embezzlement and fraud relating to her time as chairwoman of Sonangol, accusing her and three associates of having “meticulously created a plan to defraud the Angolan State.”
Dos Santos fled Angola in 2018 when first accused and has never gone back. She also left Holland when the authorities there tried to press charges at the request of Angola. “If I went to Angola I think I would be imprisoned. I don’t think Angola is a safe place for me,” she says.
Now the net seems to be closing in. Dubai has no extradition treaty with Angola, yet she insists: “I am not hiding nor a fugitive both Angolan and Portuguese authorities know my address.”
She says all the charges are lies. “When you are the child of someone powerful you’re a soft target, it’s easy to say you got this or that by influence but it’s not true. I didn’t get any government subsidies or grants or access or have loans that were unpaid. It’s all based on forged documents.”
Why would the Angolan government do that? “It’s called betrayal, and betrayal never comes from the outside — it always comes from within,” she says. Lourenço’s real motive in going after her, she claims, is because he fears her running against him.
“When [Lourenço] first came into office he was very popular, seen as a change after decades of the same person, and very quickly the first thing he decided to do is betray the former president by starting attacks against him and his family members.” Her half-brother José Filomeno dos Santos was sentenced to five years in August 2020 after £380 million was transferred from the national bank of Angola to an account in the UK in the last few weeks of their father’s presidency.
The narrative dos Santos wants to tell is one of a woman beating the odds in a macho society, becoming a role model for young Africans, of a childhood marked by war, of growing up the daughter of a scion of Africa’s liberation movement.
Her parents met at university in the 1960s in Azerbaijan, where they were both studying engineering — her mother, Tatiana Kukanova, was a chess champion from Russia; her father a young communist who had fled the Portuguese colony of Angola as a stowaway in a boat to Congo-Kinshasa (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
“Angola then was extremely repressive,” she says. “It was very hard to grow up as a young person under Portuguese colonial rule and you were second-class citizens, with no property rights or voting rights.”
Her father had joined a youth movement fighting for independence that later became the MPLA and was backed by the Soviet Union, which sent him to Baku in Azerbaijan on a scholarship. He married Tatiana, and shortly after Isabel, the couple’s only child, was born in 1973 he left for an MPLA base in the Congo to fight for independence. The family joined him.
“As a small child I lived in a military camp in the bush with freedom fighters. There was a lot of disease — malaria and cholera — and I almost died of malnutrition. I was in hospital for four months.”
Eventually, on November 11, 1975, independence was declared and her father was made foreign minister. The country quickly descended into what would become one of the most brutal civil wars of the 20th century as a rival independence movement, Unita, led by Jonas Savimbi, battled for power. Angola became the focus for a Cold War proxy conflict, with the ruling MPLA backed by the Soviets and Cuba while Unita was supported by the US, South Africa and Britain. As many as a million people would die by the time the war ended in 2002 and the country would be littered with landmines — it’s where Princess Diana famously walked through a minefield to raise awareness.
In 1979 the president died and her father took over. “Nothing changed. We always lived in a small house, my father was a very humble man,” she insists. “Later, when he moved into a palace, he insisted on living in what were meant to be the staff quarters. We had ration books like everyone else and I walked to school, 30 minutes under the sun.” Her mother, she claims, even kept chickens and sold eggs to subsist.
Her parents divorced and her father remarried, and when Isabel was about 13 her mother took her to England, where she went to Cobham Hall boarding school in Kent. “It was a huge shock. I came from a school with nothing — Cuban teachers in the sun — and then suddenly there were uniforms, assembly, a school café
“I arrived in September not speaking English, then did my GCSEs in June.” She says she got all As.
From there she went to St Paul’s and then studied for an electrical engineering degree at King’s College London, sharing a room with four other students on the Edgware Road. After graduating she got a job at one of the biggest consultancy companies, Coopers & Lybrand, which later became part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
After some time she decided to return to Angola, “the place I was most needed”. She didn’t want to work for a state company “as people would say it was because of my father and I felt I could make a greater difference in the private sector”. Like a character in The Sopranos she worked in waste management, sold the Audi she was given on graduation to buy two trucks and launched her first business delivering drinks. She purchased more trucks and, facing a challenge in managing them, began a side business renting out walkie-talkies.
In the late 1990s the government started liberalising the economy and issued a tender for a second mobile licence. It was awarded to dos Santos. Unitel, her company, would go on to become Angola’s largest operator with 80 per cent of the market — and known as “Isatel”. It was widely believed she won the contract because of her dad.
“I heard that a lot,” she sighs. “People assume because your father is in a position of power you will be given or granted rights or concessions. But my proposal was stronger than the others — I designed it with Ericsson, the Swedish company who were then the biggest set provider, whom I worked with on the walkie-talkies.”
She scrolls through photos on her phone of herself in a hard hat. “I really leveraged my engineering degree,” she says. “We went on to build the largest fibre network in the country — a US$3.9 billion ($6.3 million) network laid over ten years through private investment. It allowed Angola to be one of the first places in the world to test 5G. Because of this we became the biggest telecoms company.”
But something else was going on. In 2002 Jonas Savimbi was killed and the civil war ended almost overnight. At about the same time the country found itself in an oil boom, becoming the second biggest producer in Africa. In some years growth was as high as 18 per cent and by 2012 the economy had grown tenfold. Luanda overtook Hong Kong to become the most expensive city on earth for expats to live in. But at the same time most of the population survived on less than $2 a day and Angola had one of the world’s worst child mortality rates.
The ruling MPLA is believed to have stashed billions abroad — the IMF says at least £25 billion ($51.6 billion) of state oil revenue went missing between 2007 and 2010 (though the MPLA claimed £21 billion was an accounting discrepancy). The anticorruption group Transparency International ranked the country as one of the most corrupt in the world. It was also highly repressive; Amnesty International called it “a climate of fear”. Open criticism of President dos Santos was considered a crime. When I ask his daughter if he was a good leader, she replies: “He had a lot of achievements and his biggest was peace for Angola.”
These were also boom years for Isabel dos Santos, who became known as the gatekeeper to Angola for foreign investors. To poor Angolans she was “the princess”. Didn’t she ever feel guilty as she drove past the shanty towns? “Guilt would be if you had the onus of what is happening,” she replied. “The onus is historical — the legacy of war. The way I felt I could contribute was building these companies, creating opportunities for young people.”
Her wedding to Dokolo, the son of a Danish mother and Congolese banker father, in 2002, was said to have cost £1.6 million ($3.3 million). They flew in many of their 10,000 guests as well as a choir from Belgium. “We both have big families,” she shrugs. “It didn’t cost that much.”
The couple met in Luanda, where Dokolo, a businessman and art collector, had stopped en route to Brazil. Within four days, she says, he proposed. “He never got to Brazil.” The couple bought a superyacht, Hayken, for £26 million ($53.7 million) from the London-based property developer Christian Candy. The rapper Nicki Minaj and singer Mariah Carey were flown into Luanda to perform at their events at a cost of millions.
“It wasn’t for me,” she says. “It was for the thousands and thousands of young Angolans who were fans. It was an annual tradition at Unitel to do a concert for free or at very low cost and fly in a big star.”
I ask about her husband’s death in 2020 — he had gone out on a boat in Dubai to free-dive and never came back. He was extremely experienced — he had been diving for 15 years to help with a lung disease, which she claims is also why they moved to Dubai during Covid.
“He was in great shape, was a great sportsman and used to dive two or three times a week, so definitely something went wrong that was not supposed to "
I ask her to elaborate. “At one stage we were followed a lot by Angolan secret services, our family was followed, they had people deployed. It was a scary time for us as a family.”
Would they have gone to that extreme? “Really, I have very little information on what happened,” she replies. “It was a very hard time for me emotionally and our focus was on healing and staying together, and on my children.” Dokolo’s funeral was held at Westminster Cathedral in London.
“It’s a mystery,” she sighs. “In Dubai nobody asks questions. I think this is something I will never know and I have to make peace with.” Tears spill from her eyes.
The couple used to go to glitzy parties on the French Riviera hosted by De Grisogono, a Swiss jewellery company, where guests included Naomi Campbell, Antonio Banderas and DiCaprio.
Dokolo had signed a deal in 2012 with Angola’s state diamond company Sodiam to buy De Grisogono. The deal was structured 50-50 but according to Luanda Leaks Sodiam paid £51 million ($105 million) while Dokolo paid only £2.5 million ($5.1 million); the same amount that was paid to him as a fee by Sodiam. And Sodiam borrowed its stake from BIC, a bank owned by dos Santos, on a loan guaranteed by the government in a decree signed by her father.
“They put up the same amount of money,” she insists. “My husband put a great deal of his own personal money in it. The idea was for Sodiam to go from mine to mall — you mine the diamonds, sort them, cut them, make the jewellery and sell it in the mall to get the full integrated chain and added value.” In fact it went bankrupt.
Among other accusations of corruption in Luanda Leaks was that in 1999 her father set up a company called Angola Selling Corp to market diamonds and gave a 24.5 per cent share to a company controlled by dos Santos and her mother. Documents from 2006 show Dokolo paid Sonangol just £8 million ($16.5 million) for a stake in the Portuguese oil company Galp worth £53 million ($109.5 million), the balance paid by what appears to be an interest-free loan from the government. That stake, held through a Dutch registered company, Exem Energy, grew to be worth £400 million ($826.5 million).
Dos Santos denies all these accusations, insisting her success is down to her own business prowess. Is she saying having her father as president didn’t help at all?
“I think when your parents are in a position of leadership there’s no doubt you’re exposed more to things, and know more of the world, because you are living close to a person who has a lot of knowledge, and it gives you a lot more contacts,” she replies, but adds: “There’s a lot of responsibility with being politically exposed, especially in today’s world.”
For this reason she says she avoided taking any state jobs — yet in June 2016 she was named head of the state oil company.
The oil price had dropped, she says, and the company was in pre-bankruptcy. “It was a hard decision,” she adds, as she was busy with her own projects. “But I felt a sense of mission — the national oil company is a symbol of national pride, 95 per cent of our economy, and no one wanted that to fail.”
Because of conflict of interest concerns, she points out, she recused her consultancy company, Wise, from the restructuring. It was replaced by Matter Business Solutions, a Dubai company — which happened to be controlled by her friend Paula Oliveira. Oliveira was indicted with her by Angola last month.
Dos Santos did not last long. In September 2017, when Lourenço — known locally as J-Lo — became president, he launched a campaign against corruption and dismissed her within two months.
Her legal rights, she says, have been violated. “I’ve had my assets frozen for four years and not had the right to defend myself. The most frustrating thing is the fact I don’t have anywhere to go and show people — look, this is fake, this is forged.”
This is where things get weirder. She starts showing me documents on her phone including a forged copy of her passport signed by “Bruce Lee” . She claims the Angolan state and secret services are using forged documents to implicate her.
Even if the campaign against her by the Angolan state is victimisation — and it is the case that other family members have been targeted — how does she explain the rulings in the Netherlands, Portugal and London? “It’s so easy to freeze assets,” she says. “It’s enough for you to have a good arguable case — just to say there’s a strong allegation in these newspaper articles.”
Dos Santos also dismisses the ICIJ and Luanda Leaks publication. “They got [the documents] in October and published them in January. It’s very unlikely you can read 715,000 documents in three months, especially if you don’t speak Portuguese.” I point out that they were working with about 35 mainstream media outlets including the Portuguese newspaper Expresso, The New York Times, the BBC and The Guardian. Is she saying they were all wrong?
“What I’m saying is the Angolan state is lying. The ICIJ got fed documents that were manipulated. These stories were told to the ICIJ and most of the other media groups were copying and pasting them. They weren’t doing their own investigation.”
That’s quite an accusation against the ICIJ. “It happens,” she shrugs. “Sometimes people are used. I am not saying they wanted to be part of an Angolan state lawfare campaign against a potential opponent, but it happened, and I really hope that next time people approach them with documents they do take care to verify independently.”
Gerard Ryle, the ICIJ’s director, says they stand by their story. “Contrary to Ms dos Santos’s allegations, the documents upon which ICIJ relied for its reporting were not manipulated, and ICIJ independently verified all of its reporting for the series. It is also false that ICIJ made or acknowledged errors in its reporting or that the stories kept changing.”
“[The media] accused me of evicting people to build a coastal road when it was actually a dredging project, so no one needed to move,” dos Santos says. “They claimed the brewery I built was with state money, then they said, oops, we made a mistake, it was actually built with a commercial loan and part of that came from a German bank. The fact is the stories kept changing so yes, unfortunately journos can be used by malign governments working against opponents.”
She points out that the economy in Angola is declining and says many young people see her as a hero. She insists Lourenço was particularly threatened because she is a woman. “I think being an African woman entrepreneur is a political statement in itself. You are affirming yourself towards men in general and in Africa in particular. You’re also playing a role for other women to emancipate themselves and become independent and breadwinners — and that’s disruptive.”
Whatever the truth of her story, there is no doubt she has gone through a lot in the past four years, losing her father, her husband and her empire.
“There’s an Arab proverb, ‘God doesn’t give you a load heavier than you can carry,’ she says. “I like to believe that. If these are my challenges, I must live up to them.”
She says she has lost 20kg and posts videos on TikTok from the gym and doing kickboxing, though many show her dancing. “What else is there?” she asks with a wry smile. One of her Instagram posts reads “It’s the little things in everyday life that give me motivation to keep fighting”.
Most show her switching between outfits with hashtags such as #boytoystyle and #leopardprint, lounging on the beach at sunset, posing by a swimming pool in a long silver dress with a string of pearls.
Why do you post these things, I ask. Aren’t you are rubbing people’s faces in it with your glamorous life?
“Would you believe it wasn’t glamorous if I didn’t?” she asks. With that she sashays off to her apartment on Billionaires’ Island.
Written by: Christina Lamb
© The Times of London