How leaked documents show Isabel dos Santos stole her fortune

This appeared in The Millennial Source

Leaked documents on Sunday allege that Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman and daughter of Angola’s former president, built her wealth through corruption and by exploiting her country.

The files were initially obtained by the Paris-based anti-corruption charity Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), which shared them with the New York-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which then publicly released the documents.

The more than 700,000 leaked documents, dubbed the “ Luanda Leaks,” include emails, invoices, slide presentations and contracts that show how during her father’s 38-year rule, dos Santos and her husband, art collector Sindika Dokolo, amassed a fortune of more than $2 billion through their stakes in Angolan industries like telecommunications, diamonds and construction.

The leaks offer details of how those holdings came about, including presidential decrees from her father, from which she benefitted, and the formation of a network of offshore companies. Over decades, these offshore companies got consulting jobs, loans, public works contracts and licenses worth billions of dollars from the Angolan government.