Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter of Angola’s longstanding president, has been declared Africa’s first female billionaire.
The 40-year-old offspring of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who took power in Angola in 1979 following a coup, has made her fortune through the acquisition of stakes in a range of companies in Portugal and her homeland in recent years.
In the early 1990s dos Santos graduated from King’s College in London with a civil engineering degree. She has gone on to become a successful business woman in Angola’s capital, Luanda – where she started out by opening a restaurant in 1997.
Ms dos Santos has come a long way since then.
According to Forbes magazine, Ms dos Santos increased her holding in Portuguese media firm Zon last year to 28.8 per cent, which brings her stake’s value in that company to about $385 million (€286 million). In addition she has a 19.5 per cent share of Portuguese bank Banco BPI worth $465 million and a 25 per cent stake in Angola’s Banco BIC worth $160 million.
Disappearing money trail
It has also been reported that Ms dos Santos owns a 25 per cent stake in Unitel, one of Angola’s two mobile networks. That holding alone is said to be worth $1 billion.
Forbes noted that, while the value of Ms dos Santos’s business empire could be verified through financial records, it was unclear where the money she used to make her investment originated from.
Angola has become one of Africa’s wealthiest nations over the past two decades due to its vast diamond and oil reserves, and President dos Santos’s family is said to have gained control of a large chunk of that economy through questionable means.
Despite growing opposition to Mr dos Santos, whose MPLA government is accused of failing to lift living standards, he secured a new five-year term in office last August.
Transparency International, the global watchdog that investigates government fraud, recently ranked Angola 168th out of 178 countries in its corruption perception index.
In January last year an International Monetary Fund report noted that a $32 billion hole in the state budget could not be accounted for.
Angolan anti-corruption campaigner Rafael Marques has accused Mr dos Santos’s children of benefiting from illegal business deals and exploiting relationships.
A spokesperson for Ms dos Santos in Portugal said suggestions made in the article that her fortune originated from illegitimate sources were “speculative, unreasonable and without academic merit”.
