In recent years, a legal battle has unfolded across civil, commercial, and arbitration courts in the Netherlands. Several companies allegedly involved in a scheme of fraud, forgery, and harmful mismanagement—linked to Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, her late husband Sindika Dokolo, Portuguese manager Mário Leite da Silva, and other figures connected to Sonangol—were registered there. These entities are under investigation not only in the Netherlands but also in Portugal and Angola.
At the core of the Dutch investigations, both in civil and commercial courts, is the so-called “Exem transaction,” a deal that began at the end of 2006, after the Angolan state oil company Sonangol had already acquired—via Esperaza—an indirect stake of about 15% in Galp Energia for €198 million. In reality, Esperaza held 45% of Amorim Energia, which was also registered in Amsterdam and, in turn, owned 33.34% of Galp’s capital. But on December 21 of that same year, Sonangol sold 40% of its shares in Galp to Exem Energy, a company also based in the Netherlands and controlled by Isabel dos Santos and her husband.
“Exem, through a company belonging to Isabel dos Santos in the British Virgin Islands [Exem Africa], paid only 15% (about €11 million) of a non-commercial purchase price of around €75 million for the indirect stake in Galp; the Angolan state company Sonangol agreed with the President’s daughter that the remaining 85% would be paid from future dividends of Esperaza (to which Sonangol was already entitled in any case),” reads a document dated July 15, 2022, signed by attorney M.J. Drop, representing Esperaza Holding in the Netherlands.
Formally bankrupt since May 18, 2022, Exem remains one of the targets of civil, commercial, and criminal investigations in Portugal, Angola, and the Netherlands.
The 138-page document is, in practice, a judicial summons of several suspects involved in a scheme that began years ago but only came to a head over a decade later, in 2017, precisely when Isabel dos Santos was dismissed from her position as head of Sonangol by Angolan President João Lourenço. “In the period preceding her dismissal, but especially immediately afterward, Isabel dos Santos carried out a series of operations, always actively assisted by other defendants in this case, to extract more than $130 million [around €113 million at current exchange rates] from Sonangol and €52.6 million from Esperaza,” the document states, noting that Amorim Energia paid €147.4 million in dividends to Esperaza between 2006 and 2017—dividends that were never distributed to Sonangol and other shareholders due to the influence of the Dos Santos family.
Formally bankrupt since May 18, 2022, Exem remains under civil, commercial, and criminal investigation in Portugal, Angola, and the Netherlands—particularly by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service’s Serious Fraud Office. On August 27, 2020, Dutch prosecutors even imposed a criminal precautionary measure, a form of seizure or freezing, on Exem’s shares in Esperaza. A significant portion of the documents from the Dutch investigations has been forwarded to Portugal’s Central Department for Criminal Investigation and Prosecution (DCIAP), which is currently handling around 20 criminal investigations involving Isabel dos Santos and several of her long-time associates, including Mário Leite da Silva. Leite da Silva has in recent years returned to focusing his activities in Portugal, becoming a board member of various companies owned by Domingos de Matos—one of the shareholders of Altri and a main stakeholder of Medialivre, which owns media outlets such as CMTV, Now, CM, Record, and Jornal de Negócios. Leite da Silva is also a board member of the media company and a director of several joint-stock companies created in 2024—like Servilivre and Livre One—also headed by Domingos Matos.
When contacted in writing by CNN Portugal, Mário Leite da Silva did not respond to the questions or wish to comment on the decision or the ongoing investigations in the Netherlands.
The Circuit of Suspect Money
Another key document for understanding the investigations in the Netherlands is a forensic report on Esperaza Holding BV dated October 31, 2022. This report is part of a case filed in the Netherlands Commercial Court, a specialized tribunal for international commercial disputes. The inquiry took place in the Enterprise Chamber of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal—consisting of a president, two judges, and two appointed experts.
Spanning 181 pages and authored by court-appointed experts Willem Jan Van Andel and Eveline Neele, the report includes and reproduces dozens of banking documents, emails, and testimonies as part of an investigation ordered by Dutch authorities on September 17, 2020, at the request of Sonangol and Esperaza. Despite several attempts, the experts could not obtain or record Isabel dos Santos’s testimony but did interview, for example, Mário Leite da Silva and Sonangol’s former CFO, Sarju Raikundalia, having traveled to Portugal to question both of these long-time associates of the former president’s daughter.
These Dutch experts reconstructed, based on extensive documentation and testimony, what happened in the hours when decisions were made to transfer large sums from Esperaza to Exem Energy. Other large, rushed transfers occurred shortly after Isabel dos Santos was dismissed as Sonangol’s chairwoman in November 2017. The report—already known to Portugal’s Public Prosecutor’s Office and the National Anti-Corruption Unit (UNCC) of the Judiciary Police—includes statements such as: “This email confirms once again that it was a huge rush job—‘they are waiting for this to be signed’ and ‘since we won’t have time to consult a tax advisor.’ The question of why this all had to be done in such haste—when these were major decisions—is not raised by anyone in the email exchanges,” noted the investigators, who gave little weight to lawyer Jorge Brito Pereira’s explanation that the dividend payment issue had dragged on since 2014.
“If I am informed that two shareholders [Sonangol and Esperaza] made a decision and instruct me to expedite everything, that’s what I do,” said the lawyer during testimony at his Lisbon office on May 31, 2022, in the presence of expert Van Andel, adding, “I would be the last person to ask my client the reason for the urgency, unless there were grounds to suspect something unusual was happening (which was not the case, as I explained).”
Based on several documents and especially one email, Dutch investigators concluded in their report that “any decision” regarding the €131.5 million dividend transfer to Sonangol and Isabel dos Santos’s Exem “was not made on November 14, 2017, but rather on the late evening of November 15, 2017—many hours after Isabel dos Santos (along with Sarju Raikundalia and Manuel Lemos) had been dismissed from Sonangol’s board.” Over months of investigation, Van Andel and Neele focused on identifying who gave and executed the payment orders. Several multimillion-dollar transfers were made from Sonangol accounts to companies controlled by Isabel dos Santos and her husband.
In one case, nearly $38.2 million (€33 million) was allegedly transferred by order of Isabel dos Santos and Sarju Raikundalia from a Eurobic/Sonangol account to an Emirates NBD/Matter Business Solutions account (a Dubai-based company). “From the time the emails were sent (6:01 p.m. and 8:43 p.m. on November 15, 2017), it appears that the payment order was issued—and the transfer executed—many hours after Isabel dos Santos was dismissed as Sonangol’s chairwoman (and Raikundalia as CFO),” the report specifies.
At the time, businesswoman Paula Oliveira and Mário Leite da Silva were directors of Matter, but she was the sole shareholder of the company registered in Dubai on February 1, 2017, according to DMCC records. These two directors of Matter sent 40 invoices dated November 2, 2017, to Sonangol Ltd., a UK subsidiary: 36 totaling €23.55 million and four for $1.14 million (€991,000 today). On November 15, they sent 15 more invoices: 12 totaling €6.25 million and three for $2.03 million (€1.8 million). An additional eight invoices were sent on November 16, dated November 14, for $19.65 million (€17.1 million).
Convicted of Mismanagement
Before the report was completed, and when asked to comment on some preliminary findings, Mário Leite da Silva admitted to issuing 143 invoices to Sonangol, most of them before the Matter-Sonangol agreement was signed. He argued that Sonangol’s restructuring project had been approved in March 2017, with retroactive effect from June 2016. “This comment does not remove the fact that it is highly unusual for an agreement with a ‘genuine’ third party on the other side of the world (Dubai), worth many millions of euros, to be made orally and only documented much later—after many millions had already been paid. This sequence of events creates, at minimum, the appearance that Matter was not a true third party, but one controlled by Isabel dos Santos, making the apparent friendship between Dos Santos and Paula Oliveira even more troubling,” the investigators concluded.
For Van Andel and Eveline Neele, after being dismissed at 1:00 p.m. on November 15, 2017, Isabel dos Santos orchestrated an operation with Leite da Silva, Raikundalia, Brito Pereira, Manuel Lemos, and a senior Eurobic official (Nuno Ribeiro da Cunha, who later died by suicide in Lisbon), managing to transfer around $129 million (€112 million today) from Sonangol to companies she and her husband controlled—in just two days.
As a result, the Dutch report concluded that the decisions allegedly made by Isabel dos Santos and her trusted associates were null, especially since some were retroactive. This was the case with the decision to pay nearly €132 million in dividends. “Numerous (legal) persons cooperated in this perplexing sequence of events, resulting in Dos Santos fraudulently gaining access to €52.6 million from Esperaza’s funds,” lead investigator Van Andel concluded.
More than a year after the report, on June 15, 2023, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal upheld much of its findings and convicted several individuals for the “mismanagement” of Esperaza Holding BV—namely Isabel dos Santos, Mário Leite da Silva, Sarju Raikundalia, among others. In the 44-page ruling, the court justified that the evidence, including email messages obtained by the investigators, left no doubt of Esperaza’s “mismanagement” through deliberate schemes. “Thus, Isabel dos Santos, with the collaboration of Raikundalia, Manuel Lemos [who died in March 2023], Mário Leite da Silva, Konema Mwenenge [a childhood friend and business partner of Sindika Dokolo], and Robert Van Lier [a Dutch lawyer], and using false decisions, because they were retroactive and incorrect, enriched herself at the expense of Esperaza (and/or Sonangol) by ordering the payment of €52.6 million in dividends to Exem, without being authorized to do so,” the decision states.
“Isabel dos Santos, with the collaboration of Raikundalia, Manuel Lemos, Mário Leite da Silva, Konema Mwenenge, and Robert Van Lier, and using false decisions, because they were retroactive and incorrect, enriched herself at the expense of Esperaza (and/or Sonangol) by ordering the payment of €52.6 million in dividends to Exem, without being authorized to do so.”
— Excerpt from the Dutch court ruling
Regarding Mário Leite da Silva’s claims that he had done nothing illegal and had merely followed orders, the court emphasized that he had a duty to know he was participating in several null or illegal acts, yet he “knowingly participated in the concealment” of various documents that “attempted to create the false appearance that the decision-making and payment order” had occurred before Isabel dos Santos was removed from Sonangol’s board. “Mário Leite da Silva also knowingly participated in Isabel dos Santos’s plan,” the judgment added, noting that he instructed lawyers—including Brito Pereira (not convicted in this case)—to urgently prepare legal decisions and even signed resolutions as an Esperaza director to authorize the dividend payments to Exem.
Finally, the court ruled that even the investigation costs would have to be paid jointly by those convicted in the case: a total of €181,500, plus interest starting two weeks after the ruling, i.e., by the end of June 2023. According to multiple judicial sources who requested anonymity, this ruling paves the way for future court decisions involving substantial compensation already being pursued in Dutch courts. The Amsterdam Court of Appeal case is especially significant because it contains a vast collection of previously unpublished documents and exclusive testimony, including that of Mário Leite da Silva, Isabel dos Santos’s former advisor and confidant. He spoke for nearly five hours, beginning with how he was hired and started working with Isabel and Sindika Dokolo.
