From businessmen to accountants, to consultants and lawyers, the network of relationships that Africa’s richest woman has built to protect her empire.
This report is part of Luanda Leaks, a project of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ, based in Washington, DC. Luanda Leaks brings together 120 ICIJ professionals and another 36 vehicles from 20 countries, which investigated the business of businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa. In Brazil, the magazine Piauí, the Public Agency and the Poder360 website participate in the project. This report is by Ben Hallman, Kyra Gurney, Scilla Alecci and Max from Haldevang.
Posing at the entrance to a star-studded party at the Cannes Film Festival, Sharon Stone, an icon of the 1990s, displayed her unique bracelet. It was a large hippopotamus around its arm, with rubies for eyes, sapphire nostrils, and white diamond teeth. His body was covered in brown, gray, and white diamonds.
The stunning adornment was created by De Grisogono, Swiss luxury jewelry and host of the exclusive event, held at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera.
De Grisogono had already given parties in Cannes before. But this one, in May 2013, was especially sumptuous, with a fireworks show and chamber orchestra to rock the guests while enjoying the views of the coast. The government of Angola financed the festivities, a country with one of the highest poverty rates in the world.
The diamond trading company in Angola, known as Sodiam, and a Congolese businessman married to Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the then president of the country, had acquired control of the jewelry company in financial difficulties in the previous year. Its new directors included former employees of the giant Boston Consulting Group, which had briefly helped run the jewelry store and hoped the party would help stop a long decline in sales. Stone was the “ambassador” of that year, a star who still shone enough to attract the rich and famous to buy a Grisogono trinket.
The plan did not work. De Grisogono sold just $ 5.6 million of products in private transactions in 2013, well below its $ 33 million targets, and took on more and more debt. Angola’s state-owned diamond company now fears that its investment of more than $ 120 million will be lost for good.
The story of how Angolan public money came to be used to please 1% of the French Riviera goes beyond a dubious commercial strategy that went wrong. It offers a window into the poorly regulated professional services sector, which over the years has become the cornerstone of a thriving offshore industry that promotes money laundering, tax evasion, and public corruption worldwide.
Isabel dos Santos made her fortune by taking a piece of Angola’s wealth, often by courtesy of government decrees signed by her father, the president. She also benefited from privileged information, preferential loans, and contracts fed by public money, as revealed by the Luanda Leaks investigation, conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 36 media partners. In Brazil, piauí magazine, Poder360, and Public Agency participate in the project. In the past two decades, Isabel has acquired valuable stakes in all important Angolan industries, including oil, diamonds, telecommunications, and banks.
Isabel dos Santos and her husband, Sindika Dokolo, have built an empire of more than 400 companies and subsidiaries in 41 countries, including at least 94 in classified jurisdictions such as Malta, Mauritius, and Hong Kong. These companies acquired assets, such as high-value properties in London and Lisbon, and bought stakes in other companies, including De Grisogono jewelry.
Consultants, accountants, and lawyers provided vital support at each stage of the process, according to the ICIJ’s examination of the collection of more than 715,000 emails, contracts, and other documents.
From the store’s offices in Malta’s small tax haven to conference rooms in Switzerland and Angola, Boston Consulting, PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers), KPMG, and other large companies have helped to sustain Santos’ empire for years. These favorable relations continued long after several Western banks blocked Santos amid inquiries about the source of his wealth, according to the ICIJ analysis of the documents obtained by Luanda Leaks.
The accountants disregarded the signals that, according to experts, should have triggered alarms. Lawyers from renowned Portuguese law firms helped create front companies and move money to Santos and Dokolo. The consultants advised them on ways to manage their business and avoid taxes.
Financial institutions are subject to strict regulatory requirements, which, even though they are not always applied, tend to make them pay close attention to their customers. Professional companies face much less scrutiny. As such, they are less likely to turn down a wealthy and risky customer.
“The incentive structure still makes it very easy and profitable, and safe enough, for them to get involved in this dirty business,” said Markus Meinzer, director of financial secrecy at the Tax Justice Network, a group that studies tax evasion and financial regulation.
The Angolan government’s unlikely investment in jewelry can be attributed to a series of transactions that, in 2012, silently distributed millions of dollars through shell companies in Malta and the British Virgin Islands.
The transactions, according to ICIJ, gave Santos’ husband, Dokolo, full control of the Swiss jewelry store, despite substantial investment by the Angolan agency.
The Luanda Leaks’ documents were shared with ICIJ by the Platform for the Protection of Whistleblowers in Africa, or PPLAAF, an advocacy group based in Paris. They reveal a remarkable history of self-improvement and speculation by a businesswoman whose vast fortune and attractive narrative has bought access to prestigious Western institutions, such as the World Economic Forum and the London Business School.
In late December, after ICIJ sent questions to the Angolan government, a court in the country froze Santos and Dokolo’s assets. The Angolan government told the court that the couple and a business partner were responsible for state losses of US $ 1.1 billion.
Through their lawyers, Santos and Dokolo denied wrongdoing. Dokolo said he was a successful entrepreneur and the target of a politically motivated campaign in Angola.
Isabel dos Santos refused ICIJ’s interview requests. But in an interview with BBC Africa, which asked several questions on behalf of the ICIJ, Santos called the investigation “political persecution”.
She accused the current Angolan government of targeting her family to divert attention from the country’s economic problems. “My stakes are commercial. There are no funds from public contracts or money that have been diverted from public funds, ”he said.
Isabel dos Santos would participate in the 2020 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, after Unitel, the mobile phone company of which she is partly owner, was named an associated partner in 2019. After the asset freeze, however, the World Economic Forum said Santos would no longer attend the annual meeting.
The first daughter of Angola
Isabel dos Santos was born in Azerbaijan in 1973, the daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, who would become Angolan president, and Tatiana Kukanova, a Russian woman that her father met and married while studying petroleum engineering.
Isabel dos Santos graduated from King’s College London in the 1990s, in electrical engineering and business administration. Then he worked at Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm that later became part of PwC, and as a project manager on a sanitation project in Luanda.
She became the richest woman in Africa, with an estimated net worth of at least $ 2 billion and holdings in telecommunications, banks, and several other industries.
In speeches and interviews, Santos promotes himself as a billionaire and an inspiring figure, whose great wealth is attributable to his business skills. “I am not financed by state money or public funds,” she told the Wall Street Journal.
But Santos’ self-made woman narrative has never withstood close scrutiny.
His father was president of Angola, a country devastated by poverty and civil war, for 38 years (1979 to 2017), and his government was widely considered corrupt. In 2013, Angola was almost at the end of a corruption index published by Transparency International. A flood of stories, including an investigation by Forbes magazine, also published in 2013, linked Isabel dos Santos’ fortune to government aid and preferential contracts, including participation in a major telecommunications company.
José Eduardo dos Santos did not answer ICIJ questions. In an open letter, he rejected allegations of wrongdoing, saying he never transferred money from the government to himself “or to any other entity”.
“Like the devil on the cross”
Western banks were paying attention, as ICIJ documents show. After the 2008 global financial crisis and a series of money laundering scandals, regulators closely monitored credit institutions, and Santos and her husband fit the profile of customers that many entities decided they could no longer support.
A major United States banking regulator issued a cease and desist order for Citibank, a subsidiary of Citigroup, in 2012, after discovering that the bank had failed to identify risky customers and prevent illegal money transfers. Highlighted cases against JPMorgan Chase and HSBC at the same time led to the hiring of thousands of compliance officers to clear lists of people linked to political corruption or criminal activity.
Later, in 2012, another Citigroup subsidiary, Citigroup Global Markets Limited, came out of a financing agreement with the Dutch holding company Amorim Energia BV. Barclays Bank did the same in 2013. Both were responding to concerns about the company’s shareholders, including Sonangol, which is Angola’s state oil company, and Exem Energy BV, a company owned by Dokolo, documents show. After Amorim Energia threatened legal action, Citigroup Global Markets agreed to pay US $ 15 million as part of a confidential agreement. Citigroup and Barclays declined to comment for this report.
Santander, an important Spanish bank, classified Santos as a “politically exposed person” – a term that applies to civil servants and their families – and refused to work with her, the documents indicate. Politically exposed people, known in finance by the acronym in English, “PEPs”, are considered risky customers because they can abuse their positions to engage in bribery, money laundering, and other forms of corruption.
“These guys hear about Isabel and run like hell on the cross,” wrote a Santos business manager about Banco Santander in a 2014 email to a colleague.
Even Deutsche Bank, which was fined more than $ 600 million for not interrupting a money-laundering scheme in Russia, blocked Santos’ husband’s attempts to transfer money, the emails show. (Deutsche Bank declined to comment. A spokesman said the bank carefully monitors risks related to politically exposed people.)
But accountants, consultants, and other professional advisers were not deterred.
Each of the four large accounting firms worked for Santos’ companies long after several banks broke ties. Deloitte served as an auditor for Finstar, an Angolan satellite TV company partly owned by Santos, and Ernst & Young did the same with ZOPT, a company that Santos uses in its participation in NOS, a major cable TV and Internet provider in Portugal. KPMG acted as an auditor for two companies in the Santos retail chain and was a consultant for Urbinveste, a project management company in Santos.
Among the four major consultancies, PwC played the most important role in the Santos empire, providing accounting and auditing services to companies related to her and her husband in Malta, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. PwC also provided tax and financial advice to Angolan companies owned or partially owned by the couple. Companies in the PwC global network earned more than $ 1.28 million for this work, from 2012 to 2017, an ICIJ analysis found, including more than $ 900,000 charged to companies incorporated in Malta’s offshore financial center.
PwC did not answer detailed questions about its work for companies linked to Santos, citing confidentiality restrictions, but said it “took steps to end any work in progress” for entities controlled by members of the Santos family.
“We strive to maintain the highest professional standards at PwC, and set expectations for consistent ethical behavior from all PwC companies in our global network,” the company said in a statement. “In response to the very serious and worrying allegations raised, we immediately started an investigation and are working to thoroughly assess the facts and complete our investigation.”
Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and KPMG also cited confidentiality restrictions by refusing to answer specific questions about their work. The companies are said to have strict screening procedures for potential customers. Deloitte and KPMG said they review customers annually; EY Portugal (which is part of Ernst & Young) said that it reviews its customer acceptance procedures every year to ensure that they comply with current laws.
KPMG said it carries out additional steps for audit clients in Angola, which includes examining the company’s forensic team.
Watching the watchmen
Accountants play a critical supervisory role, with the aim of compelling companies to be truthful about their finances. Done correctly, audits provide public pension funds and other investors with crucial information about how companies are managed and whether it is safe to invest in them.
When accountants fail, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Like the credit rating agencies that rated high defective mortgage securities sold by their clients on Wall Street, the Big Four struggled to put profits ahead of their professional obligations.
A fraud scandal at Enron in the early 2000s brought down the energy giant and its auditor, Arthur Andersen. Each of the four big consulting firms has had its own stumbles, including claims to help clients commit or cover up wrongdoing.
But due to their subsidiary role in the financial system and a less stringent regulatory burden than banks and other players, accountants, for the most part, have managed to escape the public’s view. A New York court case, for example, claimed that Ernst & Young helped hide problems at Lehman Brothers that triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, and the British House of Lords criticized the entire UK accounting class as “compliant. ”. These spots, however, were lost in the turmoil of the great recession. (Ernst & Young accepted a $ 10 million deal, but admitted no wrongdoing.)
“Accountants tended to go unnoticed,” said Nate Sibley, a researcher who studies anti-corruption policies at the Hudson Institute, based in Washington.
The United States, which has imposed some of the toughest money laundering laws on banks, does not have federal laws that require accountants to examine potential clients or report suspicious activity to law enforcement officials.
The North American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the largest association of accountants in the world, has issued guidelines to guide members in evaluating clients, but there is no evidence that US accountants in general “ask more questions about clients than absolutely necessary, ”according to the Financial Action Task Force (Gafi), an anti-money laundering organization in 37 member countries.
The main US regulatory body, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a nonprofit organization created by Congress in 2002, has the authority to oversee audits of US publicly traded companies. Critics say the supervisory board was not aggressive enough in policing the Big Four. A recent investigation by the Government Oversight Project, a non-partisan oversight group, found that in the past 16 years the council has identified 808 defective audits carried out by the Big Four, but has only presented 18 cases of the legal process.
The Big Four spent a lot to influence regulation. In all, companies have lobbied nearly $ 90 million over the past decade, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsible Policy. More recently, they fought a bill that would make the supervisory board’s disciplinary proceedings against accounting firms public. Currently, the board is required to keep disciplinary proceedings confidential until its decision is reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission or after the review period.
Uneven application in Europe
On paper, European Union rules are much stricter. The EU requires accountants to examine clients and alert national authorities if they suspect that a client’s funds “are the product of criminal activity”. Like banks, accounting firms must file a suspicious activity report if they believe a client is laundering money. The EU includes Malta, where many companies owned by Santos and her husband are incorporated.
According to EU rules, senior executives must approve decisions by accounting firms to enroll politically exposed people, and companies must take “appropriate measures” to ensure that a client’s money source is legitimate. Verification may include consulting reports, checking commercial databases, and studies from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. This level of scrutiny must continue throughout the business relationship.
But research shows that compliance is irregular. In at least 10 European Union countries, accountants filed fewer than 10 reports of suspicious transactions in 2015, according to a European Commission study. Banks in many of these countries have submitted thousands of reports over the same period.
Meanwhile, other research has found that accountants, whether intentionally or not, often facilitate money laundering. A recent analysis of more than 400 cases of corruption and money laundering, conducted by the Transparency International chapter in the UK, documented the involvement of hundreds of professional consultants, including 62 accounting firms in the country.
“Without the assistance of these people, these corruption schemes and the resulting money laundering would not be possible,” Ben Cowdock, one of the researchers who worked on the report, told ICIJ.
Some EU countries have tried to suppress this activity. Denmark is investigating Ernst & Young’s operations thereafter the company reportedly failed to report warning signs to authorities during the audit of Danske Bank, which is involved in a money-laundering scandal. (EY Denmark told Bloomberg News that it “reported as needed.”)
In other EU countries, however, professional agencies and bodies charged with controlling accountants appear to have done little to ensure compliance with anti-money laundering laws.
In addition, much of the Big Four’s work takes place outside the reach of Western regulators. Although headquartered in major Western cities, the industry operates on a franchise model in which global networks of affiliated companies share the same brand, but are generally independent legal entities, bound only by local laws, in most cases.
“Although they present themselves as global companies, they only use the word ‘global’ when they want to win business,” said Prem Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Sheffield (UK). “When it comes to accountability, their claims about globalization disappear, and then they say they are a loose network of national companies – even though they have a global website, a global council.”
In 2018, Gafi closely examined how criminals hide their assets to launder money and evade taxes. Analysts found that professional intermediaries, including accountants, played a key role in most of the 106 cases studied.
“Professional service providers significantly increase the ability of criminals to engage in sophisticated money laundering schemes to hide, accumulate and move volumes of illicit wealth,” says the Gafi report.
Buying credibility
In interviews, Isabel dos Santos indicated her relationships with large consulting firms as validation that her wealth is legitimate. In October, she told the Portuguese news agency, Lusa, that she had been carefully examined to work with several entities, including “consultancies that are among the top five in the world”.
Consulting firms are subject to even less legal requirements to assess their clients than accountants. In the United States and the European Union, they are not subject to any specific regulations against the money laundering sector.
This leaves little more than the threat of reputational damage to guide their behavior.
McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting, and Booz Allen Hamilton continued their relationships with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to press reports, despite the Crown Prince’s alleged involvement. McKinsey also worked for other authoritarian governments, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Luanda Leaks documents provide information on the relations between consultants and Santos’ businesses that they advised.
In 2016, McKinsey created a strategic plan for Efacec Power Solutions, a Portuguese manufacturer of electrical energy equipment, in which Santos had a majority stake.
PwC suggested creative ways to reduce taxes. In 2017, for example, PwC consultants told a retail group in Santos called Grupo Condis that they could take advantage of “very competitive” tax rates, “potentially between 0% and 5%”, by incorporating a holding in a financial center offshore such as Malta or Singapore. The company also advised Ciminvest, a Santos company with a stake in an Angolan cement producer, in the payment of loans and distribution of dividends.
From 2010 to 2016, Boston Consulting sent invoices of at least $ 4.3 million to companies owned or partially owned by Santos and Dokolo, concluded the ICIJ, including more than $ 3.5 million for a subcontract from Wise Intelligence Solutions Limited, Maltese company owned by the couple. The Angolan government had awarded Wise a contract worth US $ 9.3 million in 2015 to help it restructure state oil company Sonangol. Wise also subcontracted PwC, which charged $ 273,000 for its work on the project.
Through his lawyers, Santos said that the Angolan government sought its involvement in the project “because it is one of the few Angolans with substantial experience in international business”. Santos also denied receiving tax advantages for operating in foreign companies or abroad.
A Boston Consulting spokeswoman said the company’s senior partners “regularly review the type of work done – before it is done and during delivery”.
“In Angola, we review payment structures and contracts, as we do in all projects, to ensure compliance with established policies and to avoid corruption and other risks,” she said.
In response to questions from ICIJ, McKinsey said that its relationship with Efacec started before Santos became a shareholder. “McKinsey typically serves business management, not individuals or shareholders,” added an e-mail spokesman.
From Grisogono: an advantageous business
For more than two decades, De Grisogono jewelry has sold watches, rings, bracelets, and other luxury items to the world elite in boutiques in New York, Paris, and more than a dozen other cities.
Its founder, Fawaz Gruosi, who was a seller at other luxury jewelry stores, made a point of throwing parties that attracted Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum, and Ivana Trump. But his impressive Rolodex was not enough to make De Grisogono prosper. Sales fell after the 2008 financial crisis, and the company struggled with an increasing debt burden.
In 2012, salvation came from an unlikely pair. Sodiam, the commercial arm of the Angolan state diamond company, and Santos’ husband, Dokolo, acquired the controlling stake in De Grisogono. Gruosi maintained a minority stake.
Documents and emails obtained by the ICIJ reveal that the terms of the acquisition were hugely favorable to Dokolo. The agreement gave him “total management control” of the jewelry store, according to a draft shareholder agreement. Dokolo also received a “success fee” of approximately US $ 4 million, drawn from the Angolan State, for organizing the agreement that left him in charge.
The transaction worked like this: Sodiam and Shell Investments BV, owned by Dokolo, set up a third company, Victoria Holding, in Malta. Victoria Holding has become the largest investor in Victoria Limited, another Maltese front company. Victoria Limited became the majority investor in De Grisogono.
Records indicate that Sodiam, then under the influence of Santos’ father, initially provided $ 45 million to settle De Grisogono’s debt and acquire shares in distressed jewelry. Some of the money was also used to pay the “success fee” to one of Dokolo’s offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, called Almerk International Limited.
Through his lawyers, Dokolo said he invested an initial $ 115 million in jewelry and later invested significantly more. He said he received the success rate, which he reinvested in the company, for “complex successful negotiations and structuring the acquisition”.
“The strategic vision for the acquisition of De Grisogono, foreseen by Mr. Dokolo, was to achieve vertical integration of the Angolan diamond industry and create a value-added business throughout the value chain, from mining to polishing and sales in the retailers, ”said Dokolo’s lawyers in response to questions from the ICIJ.
Sodiam continued to lend money to the jewelry store after the acquisition. Altogether, according to a 2016 letter that Sodiam sent to accountants, it pumped more than $ 120 million – money that the state company itself had lent. Records show that Sodiam lent at least $ 98 million at a 9% interest rate from Banco BIC in Angola, of which Santos is partially owner.
Under new direction, the jewelry hired consultants from Boston Consulting for several months and then hired several of them for key leadership positions. De Grisogono appointed Boston Consulting project leader John Leitão as CEO in 2013 and President Elmar Wiederin, who had been Boston Consulting’s main contact with jewelry in 2015, as CEO.
In an interview with ICIJ partners in The New York Times, Leitão characterized Boston Consulting’s role in jewelry as “shadow management”. (Boston Consulting disputes this and claims that the company only worked on 3 specific projects.)
De Grisogono wasted money all the time. The company accumulated huge debts, including loans from Sodiam, while continuing to throw lavish parties at the Cannes Film Festival. Leitão did not apologize for spending too much on parties. “To expand the business, you make a lot of noise,” he said. “Everyone wants to go to your parties.”
In 2016, De Grisogono had laid off employees in Geneva, New York and London. She struggled to pay suppliers, practically everyone who lost confidence in the jewelry store, said a senior manager at the company.
“I am surprised that our top management did not anticipate these problems,” complained Gruosi, founder and minority partner of De Grisogono, in an email from 2015. He left the company in early 2019.
In response to questions from the ICIJ, Gruosi said he had no information about the company’s corporate or financial structure because his role in the new society was restricted to that of the creative director.
Leitão, the former CEO of De Grisogono, told The New York Times that the company’s financial problems were exacerbated by [US] sanctions against Russia and the drop in oil prices, which hit the pockets of Russian and Eastern customers. Medium. If the jewelry store had been successful, he said, its shareholders would have made a fortune.
De Grisogono declined to comment. Wiederin said the confidentiality rules prevented him from answering questions about the company’s finances.
Final accounting
Accountants at Victoria Holding and Victoria Limited, Maltese companies with a majority stake in De Grisogono, appear not to have seen the warning signs on their financial statements.
In 2013, PwC’s Malta office prepared financial statements for companies covering the 2012 calendar year. The emails show that Daniel Difesa, a PwC accountant, asked Santos’ financial advisers at Fidequity, an administrative services company, about Almerk, a front company in the British Virgin Islands of Dokolo, which received a $ 4 million “success fee”. Fidequity played a central role in the operations of companies, including coordination with accountants and lawyers, for much of the Santos empire.
Difesa wanted to know if Almerk was a “related party”, that is, linked to the shareholders of the Maltese front companies. Fidequity’s manager, Antonio Rodrigues, replied that he did not know – although internal communications indicate that he knew very well that Dokolo owned Almerk.
Based on the records analyzed by the ICIJ, it appears that PwC accepted the answer and did not elaborate further.
ICIJ shared documents and email exchanges related to PwC’s preparation of the 2012 financial statements, which the company also audited, with 4 experts: one in combating money laundering, a forensic accountant, a former auditor, and a former – US customs investigator. Everyone cited the $ 4 million “success fee” paid to Almerk as suspicious.
“Paying huge and dubious consulting fees to anonymous companies in sensitive jurisdictions should set off all alarms,” said Christoph Trautvetter, a Berlin-based forensic accountant.
It is not clear whether PwC has reported the warning signal to the Maltese authorities. PwC did not answer detailed questions about its work for Victoria Holding and Victoria Limited, citing confidentiality restrictions.
Difesa, who no longer works for PwC, has not responded to several requests for comment. PwC’s code of conduct, which applies to its affiliated firms worldwide, instructs employees to know the identity of their clients and to adhere to anti-money laundering standards. “Where we suspect criminal behavior, we take appropriate action,” says the code.
Rodrigues and other Fidequity managers did not respond to several requests for a statement.
Robert Mazur, a money-laundering expert, and a former United States federal agent, said that based on the documents he analyzed, PwC and Fidequity “should have taken seriously” a report of suspicious activity.
Mazur, who posed as a money launderer for Pablo Escobar’s Colombian cartel in the 1980s, identified the “success fee” paid to Almerk as a warning sign because of the secrecy surrounding the company’s shareholders and nature “ intangible assets ”of the services it was supposed to provide.
“In the past few decades, this type of payment used to be arranged to cover payments related to corruption and/or illegal activity,” he said.
Records show that PwC continued as an auditor for Victoria Holding and Victoria Limited. PwC conducted the audit of Victoria Limited in 2016, which was submitted to the Malta Business Registry in 2018. As of January 17, the company was still listed as an auditor for both companies in the Malta business registries.
In October, ICIJ media partners interviewed the president of Sodiam, Eugênio Pereira Bravo da Rosa, in the capital of Angola, Luanda.
Bravo da Rosa, appointed to the state-owned diamond company in November 2017, said that Sodiam “has not profited even a dollar” from its investment in De Grisogono. He criticized the deal that put Dokolo in charge of the jewelry store and left Sodiam without a management position.
“It’s weird,” said Bravo da Rosa. “I don’t believe that a person starts a company and lets his partner run the business with full power to make all the decisions.”
When Sodiam repays the loans it took to participate in the deal, he said, it will have lost more than $ 200 million. Sodiam says it is reimbursing Banco BIC but has not recovered its investment in De Grisogono. Banco BIC did not answer questions.
Dokolo contested that figure and told the media that he recently filed a lawsuit against Sodiam in an arbitral tribunal in London, accusing the state-owned diamond company of destroying the value of its investment in De Grisogono. He claims that Sodiam stole documents and violated confidentiality agreements.
Sodiam’s losses in the De Grisogono venture were cited as one of the justifications for the Angolan court to freeze Dokolo’s assets.
Sodiam, which in 2017 announced its intention to divest its stake in De Grisogono, is still trying to find out what happened, said Bravo da Rosa.
“That is the question we are constantly asking ourselves,” he said. “What was made of the money?”
Contributed to this report Sylvain Besson, Jacob Borg, Douglas Dalby, Will Fitzgibbon, Sydney Freedberg, Micael Pereira and Delphine Reuter
Translation by Luiz Roberto Mendes Gonçalves
