Isabel dos Santos Bio, Wiki

Isabel dos Santos is an Angolan businesswoman who is Africa’s richest woman and the eldest child of Angola’s former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country from 1979 to 2017. According to Forbes, in 2013 her net worth had exceeded US$2 billion making her Africa’s first female US dollar billionaire. In November 2015, the BBC named her as one of the 100 most influential women in the world.

Since 2018, the Angolan Government has been trying to prosecute dos Santos for past corruption crimes that may have led to Angola’s ongoing recession crisis. However, dos Santos remains in exile in Portugal. On 30 December 2019, the Luanda Provincial Court ordered the freezing of her Angolan bank accounts and the seizure of her stake in local companies, including Unitel and Banco de Fomento Angola [de].

In the meantime, dos Santos is under investigation in Portugal and has since assumed the UAE as her official country of residence. On 11 January 2020, the Angolan government announced that it is preparing a legal battle for the confiscation of her assets in Portugal, a process that is already in operation in the form of letters rogatory sent to Portugal to stop the transfer of funds from Portuguese Commercial Bank to a Russian bank.

Isabel dos Santos Education

dos Santos attended the all-girls boarding school in Kent, Cobham Hall. She studied electrical engineering at King’s College in London where she met her husband from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Sindika Dokolo.

Isabel dos Santos Age

Santos was born on April 1, 1973, in Baku, Azerbaijan  She celebrates her birthday on the 1st of April every year. She is 51 years old.

Isabel dos Santos Height

dos Santos stands at a height of 5 feet 5 inches.

Isabel dos Santos Family

Santos is the oldest daughter of Angola’s former President José Eduardo dos Santos and his first wife, the Russian-born Tatiana Kukanova, whom he met while studying in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Her grandparents came from São Tomé and Príncipe.

Isabel dos Santos Husband

dos Santos is married to Sindika Dokolo a Congolese art collector and businessman. He is the son of a millionaire from Kinshasa and his Danish wife. Her husband, Dokolo, owned one of the most important contemporary African art collections, which includes more than 3,000 pieces.

Isabel dos Santos Net Worth

dos Santos has an estimated net worth of US$ 2.1 billion which she has earned from being a successful businesswoman. She is a shareholder in several Angolan and Portuguese companies, including banks, the Angolan mobile operator Unitel, and the Portuguese oil company Galp. In 2013, Forbes described how she acquired her wealth by taking stakes in companies doing business in Angola, suggesting that her wealth comes almost entirely from her family’s power and connections.

Isabel dos Santos Career

Dos Santos has held management positions in a number of companies listed on European stock exchanges in the past 20 years. She returned from London in the early 1990s to join her father in Luanda and started working as a project manager engineer for Urbana 2000, a subsidiary of Jembas Group, which had won a contract to clean and disinfect the city. Following that, dos Santos set up a trucking business. The widespread use of walkie-talkie technology paved the way for her subsequent foray into telecoms.

In 1997, dos Santos started her first business, opening the Miami Beach Club, one of the first nightclubs and beach restaurants on Luanda Island. Over nearly 20 years dos Santos expanded her business interests, leading to the creation of several holdings, in Angola and mostly abroad, making substantial investments in high-profile enterprises, especially in Portugal. Dos Santos was appointed by her father as chairwoman of Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company in June 2016.

On 30 December 2019, the Luanda Provincial Court ordered the preventive seizure of the personal bank accounts of dos Santos, her husband, and Mário Filipe Moreira Leite da Silva. According to the Attorney General’s Office, the three businesspeople entered into deals with the Angolan state through the companies Sodium, a public diamond sales company, and Sonangol, the state oil company. With these deals, the Angolan state suffered a loss of $1.14 billion.

The court produced a document showing that the assets and many others owned by Isabel dos Santos had been acquired using funds from two state-owned companies. In the meantime, the Portuguese Attorney-General’s Office has revealed that an investigation has been opened into a number of operations by dos Santos, following a charge laid by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese Member of the European Parliament. Following the seizure, dos Santos assumed the UAE as her official country of residence.

Isabel dos Santos Investments in Portugal

Since 2008, dos Santos has had interests in telecommunications, media, retail, finance, and the energy industry, both in Angola and in Portugal. In addition to her commercial interest in oil and diamonds, she also owns shares in the Angola cement company Nova Cimangola. Jadeium, a company held by dos Santos, acquired 4.918% of ZON Multimedia shares from Spain’s Telefonica.

Dos Santos is a member of the board of Angolan Bank in Lisbon, Banco BIC Português, and through Santoro Holding, she holds 20% stakes at Banco Português de Investimento. She also has other major stakes with the Angolan state oil company Sonangol through their mutual European Law holding, based in the Netherlands, named Esperanza Holding, in Portuguese Galp Energia. She is a founding member and Board member of Banco BIC Português, which recently acquired Banco Português de Negócios, a nationalized bank.

In November 2014, she launched a takeover bid for Portugal Telecom, SGPS, S.A., valuing the firm’s shares at €1.35 a share, in what was seen as a rival bid to a previous €7 billion offer from Altice. Though the offer made by Altice is on PT Portugal, not on PT SGPS. On 1 December 2014, dos Santos formally registered her offer at the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários, CMVM, in Portuguese).

In January 2017 Unitel, led by Isabel dos Santos, officialized the purchase of 2% of Banco Fomento de Angola (BFA) from BPI for 28 million euros and now controls 51.9% of the bank’s capital. The operation was approved in December 2016 by sector regulators, namely the National Bank of Angola (BNA).

In February 2017, she decides to sell her position in Banco BPI, following the takeover bid launched by CaixaBank. She arrived in 2009, stepped out in 2017, and won more than 80 million euros: Santos’ capital gain comes not only from the sale of the 18.5% holding on BPI but also from the dividends from 2008 and 2009, worth around 12.6 million euros.

Isabel dos Santos Investments in Angola

With 51% control of Condis, she signed a joint partnership with the Portuguese Sonae group in April 2011 for the development and operation of a retail trading company in Angola. The entry in Angola by the Portuguese group led by Paulo de Azevedo will be performed by the Continente (Angola), which plans to open its first supermarket by 2013 in Angola.

Isabel dos Santos Luanda Leaks

On 19 January 2020, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published a detailed report on how Isabel dos Santos amassed her wealth over the years. The report — which it called Luanda Leaks — provides evidence of how dos Santos “made a fortune at the expense of the Angolan people”.

Isabel dos Santos Focus on Telecommunications

Dos Santos created Unitel in partnership with Portugal Telecom, after a tender process she considered fair. Also through Unitel International Holding, a platform for Unitel investments where Portugal Telecom has no presence, Dos Santos acquired the mobile operator T+, in Cape Verde and gained the license for the establishment of the second telecom operator in São Tomé and Príncipe.

Under this investment, she announced during a visit to São Tomé and Príncipe that Unitel will invest in education in the country to train engineers, managers, and other technicians and also focus on job creation. By 2015, she owned a share of satellite-TV operator ZAP, which had in December 2013 acquired the rights to distribute Forbes in a number of Portuguese-speaking countries, namely Angola, Portugal, and Mozambique.

It had been reported that most of the content would be produced by a local team, complemented by content for the North American edition, hence potentially allowing influence on Forbes content. It was initially planned that the first edition of the Portuguese language Forbes would be published during the second quarter of 2014.

Isabel dos Santos Forbes

In 2013, Forbes described how she acquired her wealth by taking stakes in companies doing business in Angola, suggesting that her wealth comes almost entirely from her family’s power and connections. Forbes removed her from the billionaire ranks in January 2021 after asset freezes. Angolan authorities charged her with embezzlement and money laundering which she denied.

Isabel dos Santos Holdings

• Santoro Finance: company vehicle for dos Santos’ investment in Banco BPI based in Lisbon
• Trans Africa Investment Services, a Gibraltar-based vehicle founded together with her mother for the diamond business
  Unitel International Holdings B.V.: change of name of Kento and Jadeium, based in Amsterdam, company vehicle for dos
• Santos’ investment in telecommunications
• Esperaza Holding B.V.: based in Amsterdam, energy, oil etc.
• Condis: a retail business based in Luanda

The table below answers some of the frequently asked questions about dos Santos.