Isabel dos Santos

Isabel dos Santos was born in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, the eldest daughter of Angola's longtime President José Eduardo Dos Santos (1942–2022) and his first wife, the Russian-born Tatiana Kukanova, whom he met while studying in the then Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

Her father's parents came from São Tomé and Príncipe.

She attended an all girls boarding school in Kent, Cobham Hall School, and St Paul's Girls' School in London.

She studied electrical engineering at King's College in London.

There she met her husband from Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), Sindika Dokolo, a son of a millionaire from Kinshasa and his Danish wife.

Isabel dos Santos (born 20 April 1973) is an Angolan businesswoman, the eldest child of Angola's former President José Eduardo Dos Santos, who ruled the country as a dictator from 1979 to 2017.

Once considered Africa's richest woman according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth exceeding US$2 billion, she was dropped from the magazine's list in January 2021 after the freezing of her assets in Angola, Portugal and the Netherlands.

She owes $340 million to the Portuguese company PT Ventures.

In 1997, she started her first business, opening the Miami Beach Club, one of the first night clubs and beach restaurants on Luanda Island.

In 1997, dos Santos entered the international business world, creating companies and holdings in Angola but mostly abroad, making substantial investments in high-profile enterprises, especially in Portugal.

In the early 90s, dos Santos started working as a project manager engineer for Urbana 2000, a subsidiary of Jembas Group, that had won a contract to clean and disinfect Luanda.

Thereafter, she set up a trucking business.

The widespread use of walkie-talkie technology paved the way for a subsequent foray into telecoms.

Since 2008 dos Santos has had interests in key Portuguese sectors, such as telecommunications, media, retail, finance and the energy.

In 2010, she bought a 20% stake at Banco Português de Investimento through Santoro Holding.

She 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.

Dos Santos is a founding member and board member of Banco BIC Português, which recently acquired Banco Português de Negócios, a nationalized bank.

In 2012 dos Santos made a series of acquisitions in ZON Multimédia, a telecommunications and media company providing mobile and fixed telephony, cable television, satellite television and internet.

From an initial small stake in the company, she became the biggest shareholder, with 28.8% in 2012.

The acquisitions were made via holding companies Jadeium and Kento, later Netherlands-based Unitel International Holdings BV.

In 2013 Forbes described how dos Santos acquired her wealth by taking stakes in companies doing business in Angola, suggesting that her wealth came almost entirely from her family's power and connections.

As of 2014, holdings of dos Santos included:

In June 2016, her father appointed her as chair of Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company.

In November 2017, João Lourenço, the new Angolan President, fired her just two months after being sworn into office in the wake of similar appointments of children of the president to key posts.

Since 2018, the Angolan government has been trying to prosecute Isabel dos Santos for corruption that may have led to Angola's ongoing recession.

On 30 December 2019, the Luanda Provincial Court ordered the freezing of dos Santos's Angolan bank accounts and the seizure of her stake in local companies, including Unitel (Angola) and Banco de Fomento Angola.

Two weeks later, the Angolan Government announced it had prepared the legal battle to confiscate dos Santos's assets in Portugal, a process that is operative in the form of letters rogatory sent to Portugal to stop the transfer of funds from Portuguese Commercial Bank to a Russian bank.

On 30 December 2019, the Luanda Provincial Court ordered the preventive seizure of the personal bank accounts of dos Santos, her husband, Sindika Dokolo, 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 Sodiam, 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 dos Santos had been acquired using funds from two state-owned companies.

As of January 2020, she was under investigation in Portugal and has since taken on the United Arab Emirates as her official country of residence.

In December 2021, the US State Department barred Dos Santos and her immediate family from entering the United States, citing "significant corruption by misappropriating public funds for her personal benefit".

On 18 November 2022, Interpol issued a warrant for her arrest.

In December 2023 her assets were frozen following a hearing at the High Court in London.

In October 2020, her husband, Sindika Dokolo, died in a diving accident in Dubai at the age of 48.

Isabel dos Santos is a citizen of both Russia and Angola.

In January 2020, the Portuguese Attorney-General's Office opened an investigation into a number of her operations after Ana Gomes, a Portuguese Member of the European Parliament laid charges against her.

Following the seizure, she assumed the UAE as her official country of residence.

In January 2021, Forbes removed her from the list of the richest people in Africa, since her assets in Angola and Portugal had been frozen.