Angola has issued an arrest warrant for Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of the former president, over accusations of corruption. The warrant was issued after an investigation found that dos Santos had allegedly funneled money from the state-owned oil company into private accounts. Authorities believe that dos Santos has fled the country and she is currently thought to be in Portugal.
The Angolan authorities are seeking the arrest of Isabel dos Santos, a former president’s daughter who was once considered Africa’s wealthiest woman, over accusations that she enriched herself with state resources, the nation’s attorney general has told a state-run news agency.
The Angolan authorities are seeking the arrest of Isabel dos Santos, a former president’s daughter who was once considered as Africa’s richest woman, over accusations that she enriched herself with state resources, the nation’s attorney general has told a state-run news agency.
Interpol issues “red notices,” which are requests to law enforcement agencies worldwide to find and detain a person. As of Tuesday morning, no such notice for Ms. dos Santos was listed in Interpol’s online database.
The effort to arrest and question Ms. dos Santos comes after years of investigations by the Angolan authorities into the enormous fortune she amassed while her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, who died in July, was president.
The effort to arrest and question Ms. dos Santos comes after years of investigations by the Angolan authorities into the enormous fortune she amassed while her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, who died in July, was president.
Her father’s 38-year tenure in office was marked by an inundation of corruption accusations; he stepped down in 2017, and his handpicked successor, João Lourenço, became president.
Mr. Lourenço vowed to fight graft, and his government soon took aim at his predecessor’s children. José Filomeno dos Santos, the former president’s son, was sentenced in 2020 to five years in prison for embezzling $500 million from Angola’s sovereign fund. (He remains free while the case is being appealed.)
Ms. dos Santos has been under intense scrutiny for years from the attorney general’s office in Angola, an oil-rich nation in southern Africa where about half of the population lives on less than $1.90 a day.
In January 2020, Mr. Pitta Grós said that Ms. dos Santos would be charged with “money laundering, influence peddling, harmful management” and “forgery of documents, among other economic crimes” that he said she committed while running Sonangol, the state-owned oil company.
No charges have been publicly filed in court. A spokesman for Mr. Pitta Grós confirmed the Angop report in a text message.
The investigation dragged on, in part because Ms. dos Santos did not live in Angola, Mr. Pitta Grós has said. She has residences in London and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, among other places.
In his remarks to Angop on Monday, Mr. Pitta Grós said that Ms. dos Santos had not responded to letters asking her to submit to questioning, which were sent to her lawyers and to her homes in Angola’s capital, Luanda, and in the Netherlands. Her current whereabouts are unknown, he said.
Reached by telephone this month, Ms. dos Santos said she had always made herself available to the authorities. She said that she and her legal team had not received any notice for her arrest and could not find one for her in Interpol’s database.
“My address is known, my whereabouts are known,” she said, adding that she was currently living in London. “I’m not a fugitive. I’m not hiding from anyone,” she added.
If a notice or warrant were issued, she said, she would be willing to go to court to provide evidence that she had never stolen state resources and that her companies were built legitimately and financed by banks.
She said the investigations and accusations against her were “political persecution” by Mr. Lourenço. “He sees me as a political threat and a potential presidential candidate,” she said.
Even as accusations of corruption and nepotism tarnished the reputation of Ms. dos Santos’s father, his name carried considerable weight because of his background in the Angolan resistance to colonial rule.
Some analysts saw his death in July as a chance for his party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or M.P.L.A., to parlay nostalgia surrounding his legacy into support in the national election, held in August.
Indeed, the party did eke out a victory, ensuring Mr. Lourenço a second term in office. But the M.P.L.A. had its worst showing ever, with many voters disappointed by continuing economic woes and cynical about Mr. Lourenço’s anticorruption campaign.
Ms. dos Santos’s wealth was once estimated at $3.5 billion by Forbes, which called her the richest woman in Africa. But many of her assets across the world, including in Portugal and the Netherlands, have since been frozen because of the corruption accusations hanging over her. Forbes has estimated that she is no longer a billionaire.
The U.S. State Department announced travel restrictions against Ms. dos Santos late last year, accusing her of “involvement in significant corruption by misappropriating public funds for her personal benefit.”
Ms. dos Santos has enlisted a Washington lobbyist, Robert Stryk, to fight the effort to arrest her and to plead her case to the Biden administration, partly by casting the charges as politically motivated retribution from a corrupt government, according to person familiar with the arrangement who was not authorized to discuss the work and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Agencies contributed to this report