Isabel dos Santos owns property worth more than 20 million euros in London and former Vice President of Angola Manuel Vicente has two luxury apartments next to the Harrods store, also in the British capital, both through offshore companies.
The names, hitherto hidden thanks to the anonymity afforded by tax havens, were revealed due to new transparency rules introduced by the United Kingdom to identify who owns property in the country.
According to the Companies House trade register, businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, accused of misappropriation of public funds and subject to an international arrest warrant, owns two residences in London.
The homes in a private condominium in the exclusive Kensington area are controlled by Wilkson Properties Limited, based in the Isle of Man, of which Isabel José dos Santos is the sole beneficiary.
One of them, an apartment, was bought in 2006 for £875,000 and the second, a house, was sold a year later for £8.65 million, according to the Land Registry.
According to the website “The Move Market”, taking into account the prices of adjacent properties and the evolution of the market, the total value of those two properties is currently 18 million pounds, about 20.5 million euros.
Isabel dos Santos is the subject of an international arrest warrant at the request of the Attorney General of the Republic of Angola, on suspicion of “crimes of embezzlement, aggravated fraud, illegal participation in business, criminal association and influence influence, money laundering”, with a maximum penalty of 12 years imprisonment.
In December, the Angolan Supreme Court ordered the preventive seizure of the assets of businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, worth a billion dollars (941 million euros), including bank balances and holdings in the name of the businesswoman, which was even considered by Forbes magazine. “the richest woman in Africa”.
In addition to criminal and civil proceedings in Angola, Isabel dos Santos has frozen assets and accounts in Portugal, where 17 cases are pending, according to the Observer.
The UK trade register has also recently been updated to identify Manuel Vicente, former chairman of Sonangol and former number two of President of Angola José Eduardo dos Santos, father of Isabel dos Santos, as the owner of two apartments worth several million euros.
Riser Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands, bought the two apartments for £940,000 and £475,000 in 2005 and 2010 respectively.
But website “The Move Market” estimates they could be worth around £6.6 million this Saturday due to their privileged location in the Knightsbridge area, both a few feet from luxury retailer Harrods.
The name of former strongman José Eduardo dos Santos has been implicated in several corruption scandals but has avoided criminal investigations thanks to the immunity granted by the Angolan Constitution to former holders of this position.
Vicente was investigated in Portugal for alleged payments to a prosecutor, Orlando Figueira, who was expelled from the profession and sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for corruption and other crimes.
The case sparked a diplomatic crisis between the two countries in 2018, which was resolved after it was separated from the “Operation Fizz” allegations and transferred to Angola, where it awaits developments.
The former president of the state oil company Sonangol was also named in the indictment of the Angolan Public Prosecutor’s Office against Generals Manuel Helder Vieira Dias and Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento.
The document states that Angola sold between December 5, 2004 and November 6, 2007 to Sonangol International Holding Limited, a company 70% owned by Chinese and 30% owned by Sonangol EP, crude oil worth in a total of 1.598 billion dollars (1.51 billion euros). without any apparent benefit to the Angolan state or to Sonangol EP itself”.
The former Angolan vice president also has ties to CIF, a Chinese company whose assets in Angola have passed into the sphere of the state, and to several companies that have damaged the country to the tune of millions of dollars.
Manuel Vicente was the subject of a property search by Angolan authorities, with a view to recovering assets, but the amounts recovered are unknown.
Another prominent Angolan public figure with valuable real estate in London is Silvio Franco Burity, former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Revenue Service and former National Director of Alfandegas de Angola.
Burity is the beneficial owner of two companies in the British Virgin Islands, Wyndham Mews Limited and Rolling Heights Limited.
These companies control a house in Stratford-upon-Avon, a village northwest of London known as the birthplace of the writer William Shakespeare in 1564, and a six-bedroom villa in the British capital, valued at nearly three million pounds (3.4 million euros).
These revelations are the result of an analysis by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Transparency International, which seven years ago denounced the lack of transparency in which offshore companies in tax havens own property in the UK, raising the suspicion money laundering ensued. money laundering through the UK property market.
Since then he has been lobbying the British government to identify the real people behind these foreign ‘front companies’ in British records.
According to the NGO, companies headquartered in “opaque financial centers” such as the British Virgin Islands regularly turn up in cases of corruption and money laundering.
The Register of Foreign Entities was created under the Economic Crime Act introduced last year, precipitated by the war in Ukraine, “to weed out corrupt oligarchs and elites who try to hide money embezzled through British real estate”.
The deadline for identifying and registering the real beneficiaries of UK properties was January 31, but thousands of companies have yet to do so.
The new land register has already served to highlight assets of “politically exposed persons” (PEP), which Transparency International says should be further investigated.
The next step, according to Ben Cowdock, responsible for investigations at Transparency International, should be for UK authorities to investigate some of these people.
“We would like the police to start an investigation into anyone accused of corruption [no estrangeiro] and moving large amounts of money into the real estate market [britânico]he told the Lusa agency.
Cowdock suggests that authorities proactively contact authorities in the jurisdictions among the people under investigation.
“British police should contact foreign law enforcement agencies and start working with them to find out if these assets can be recovered and if the money can be returned to where they came from,” he stressed.
Source: DN
