Isabel dos Santos owns properties worth more than 20 million euros in London and the 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, until now hidden thanks to the anonymity provided by tax havens, were revealed due to new transparency rules introduced by the United Kingdom to identify who owns real estate in the country.
According to the Companies House business register, businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, accused of embezzlement of public funds and subject to an international arrest warrant, has two residences in London.
The private condominium homes in the exclusive Kensington neighborhood are controlled by Isle of Man-based Wilkson Properties Limited, of which Isabel José dos Santos is the sole beneficiary.
One of them, a flat, was bought in 2006 for 875,000 pounds and the second, a house, was sold a year later for 8.65 million pounds, according to the Land Registry.
According to the website “The Move Market”, taking into account the prices of neighboring properties and the evolution of the market, the added value of these 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, qualified fraud, illegal participation in business, criminal association and influence peddling, money laundering”. incurring a maximum penalty of 12 years in prison.
In December, the Supreme Court of Angola determined the preventive seizure of the assets of the businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, valued at one billion dollars (941 million euros), including bank balances and shareholdings 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 British business register was also recently updated to identify Manuel Vicente, former president of Sonangol and former number two of Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, father of Isabel dos Santos, as the owner of two apartments valued at several million euros.
British Virgin Islands-based company Riser Limited bought the two apartments for £940,000 and £475,000 in 2005 and 2010 respectively.
But the website “The Move Market” estimates that today they could be worth about 6.6 million pounds (7.5 million euros) due to the privileged location in the Knightsbridge area, both a few meters from the store Harrods luxury goods.
The name of former warlord José Eduardo dos Santos has emerged involved in several corruption scandals, but he 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 generated a diplomatic crisis between the two countries in 2018, which was resolved after it was separated from the accusations of “Operation Fizz” and transferred to Angola, where it awaits news.
The former president of the state oil company Sonangol was also mentioned in the indictment by the Angolan Public Ministry against generals Manuel Helder Vieira Dias and Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento.
The document states that Angola sold to Sonangol International Holding Limited, a company owned 70% by Chinese and 30% by Sonangol EP, between December 5, 2004 and November 6, 2007, crude oil worth 1,598 million dollars (1,510 million euros) “without any clear benefit for the Angolan State or for Sonangol EP itself”.
The former Angolan vice president is also associated with CIF, a Chinese company whose assets in Angola have passed into the sphere of the State and with several businesses that have damaged the country in millions of dollars.
Manuel Vicente was the subject of a patrimonial investigation by the Angolan authorities, with a view to the recovery of assets, but the amounts recovered are unknown.
Another high-profile Angolan public figure with valuable real estate assets in London is Silvio Franco Burity, former president of the Board of Directors of the General Tax Administration and former national director of Alfandegas de Angola.
Burity is the beneficial owner of two British Virgin Islands based companies, Wyndham Mews Limited and Rolling Heights Limited.
These companies control a house in Stratford-upon-Avon, a town northwest of London known for being the birthplace of 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 had denounced the lack of transparency in which offshore companies located in tax havens have properties in the United Kingdom, raising suspicions of money. money laundering through the British property market.
Since then, he has been lobbying the British government for the real people behind these foreign “front companies” to be identified in British records.
According to the NGO, companies based in “opaque financial centers” such as the British Virgin Islands frequently appear in corruption and money laundering cases.
The Foreign Entities Register was created under the Economic Crimes Act introduced last year, hastened by the war in Ukraine, “to root out corrupt oligarchs and elites trying to hide embezzled money through British real estate.”
The deadline to identify and register the beneficial owners of UK properties was January 31, but thousands of companies have yet to do so.
The new cadastre has already served to highlight assets held by “politically exposed persons” (PEPs), which Transparency International argues should be subject to closer scrutiny.
The next step, according to Ben Cowdock, head of investigations at Transparency International, should be for the British authorities to open investigations into some of these people.
“We would like to see police investigations launched into anyone who has been 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 who are being investigated.
“British police should start contacting foreign law enforcement agencies and start working with them to try to find out if these assets can be recovered and the funds can be returned to their place of origin,” he stressed.
Source: TSF
