{"id":9274,"date":"2025-07-14T09:19:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T09:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/investigacao-isabel-dos-santos-e-testa-de-ferro-condenados-por-ma-gestao\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T09:22:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T09:22:59","slug":"investigation-isabel-dos-santos-and-frontman-convicted-of-mismanagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/investigation-isabel-dos-santos-and-frontman-convicted-of-mismanagement\/","title":{"rendered":"Investigation: Isabel dos Santos and Frontman Convicted of “Mismanagement”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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\u2014linked to Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, her late husband Sindika Dokolo, Portuguese manager M\u00e1rio Leite da Silva, and other figures connected to Sonangol\u2014were registered there. These entities are under investigation not only in the Netherlands but also in Portugal and Angola.<\/p>\n

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\u2014via Esperaza\u2014an indirect stake of about 15% in Galp Energia for \u20ac198 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cExem, through a company belonging to Isabel dos Santos in the British Virgin Islands [Exem Africa], paid only 15% (about \u20ac11 million) of a non-commercial purchase price of around \u20ac75 million for the indirect stake in Galp; the Angolan state company Sonangol agreed with the President\u2019s daughter that the remaining 85% would be paid from future dividends of Esperaza (to which Sonangol was already entitled in any case),\u201d reads a document dated July 15, 2022, signed by attorney M.J. Drop, representing Esperaza Holding in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

Formally bankrupt since May 18, 2022, Exem remains one of the targets of civil, commercial, and criminal investigations in Portugal, Angola, and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

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 Jo\u00e3o Louren\u00e7o. \u201cIn 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 \u20ac113 million at current exchange rates] from Sonangol and \u20ac52.6 million from Esperaza,\u201d the document states, noting that Amorim Energia paid \u20ac147.4 million in dividends to Esperaza between 2006 and 2017\u2014dividends that were never distributed to Sonangol and other shareholders due to the influence of the Dos Santos family.<\/p>\n

Formally bankrupt since May 18, 2022, Exem remains under civil, commercial, and criminal investigation in Portugal, Angola, and the Netherlands\u2014particularly by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service\u2019s Serious Fraud Office. On August 27, 2020, Dutch prosecutors even imposed a criminal precautionary measure, a form of seizure or freezing, on Exem\u2019s shares in Esperaza. A significant portion of the documents from the Dutch investigations has been forwarded to Portugal\u2019s 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 M\u00e1rio 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\u2014one of the shareholders of Altri and a main stakeholder of Medialivre, which owns media outlets such as CMTV, Now, CM, Record, and Jornal de Neg\u00f3cios. Leite da Silva is also a board member of the media company and a director of several joint-stock companies created in 2024\u2014like Servilivre and Livre One\u2014also headed by Domingos Matos.<\/p>\n

When contacted in writing by CNN Portugal, M\u00e1rio Leite da Silva did not respond to the questions or wish to comment on the decision or the ongoing investigations in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

The Circuit of Suspect Money<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014consisting of a president, two judges, and two appointed experts.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s testimony but did interview, for example, M\u00e1rio Leite da Silva and Sonangol\u2019s former CFO, Sarju Raikundalia, having traveled to Portugal to question both of these long-time associates of the former president\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s chairwoman in November 2017. The report\u2014already known to Portugal\u2019s Public Prosecutor\u2019s Office and the National Anti-Corruption Unit (UNCC) of the Judiciary Police\u2014includes statements such as: \u201cThis email confirms once again that it was a huge rush job\u2014\u2018they are waiting for this to be signed\u2019 and \u2018since we won\u2019t have time to consult a tax advisor.\u2019 The question of why this all had to be done in such haste\u2014when these were major decisions\u2014is not raised by anyone in the email exchanges,\u201d noted the investigators, who gave little weight to lawyer Jorge Brito Pereira\u2019s explanation that the dividend payment issue had dragged on since 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I am informed that two shareholders [Sonangol and Esperaza] made a decision and instruct me to expedite everything, that\u2019s what I do,\u201d said the lawyer during testimony at his Lisbon office on May 31, 2022, in the presence of expert Van Andel, adding, \u201cI 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).\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on several documents and especially one email, Dutch investigators concluded in their report that \u201cany decision\u201d regarding the \u20ac131.5 million dividend transfer to Sonangol and Isabel dos Santos\u2019s Exem \u201cwas not made on November 14, 2017, but rather on the late evening of November 15, 2017\u2014many hours after Isabel dos Santos (along with Sarju Raikundalia and Manuel Lemos) had been dismissed from Sonangol\u2019s board.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In one case, nearly $38.2 million (\u20ac33 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). \u201cFrom 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\u2014and the transfer executed\u2014many hours after Isabel dos Santos was dismissed as Sonangol\u2019s chairwoman (and Raikundalia as CFO),\u201d the report specifies.<\/p>\n

At the time, businesswoman Paula Oliveira and M\u00e1rio 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 \u20ac23.55 million and four for $1.14 million (\u20ac991,000 today). On November 15, they sent 15 more invoices: 12 totaling \u20ac6.25 million and three for $2.03 million (\u20ac1.8 million). An additional eight invoices were sent on November 16, dated November 14, for $19.65 million (\u20ac17.1 million).<\/p>\n

Convicted of Mismanagement<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before the report was completed, and when asked to comment on some preliminary findings, M\u00e1rio Leite da Silva admitted to issuing 143 invoices to Sonangol, most of them before the Matter-Sonangol agreement was signed. He argued that Sonangol\u2019s restructuring project had been approved in March 2017, with retroactive effect from June 2016. \u201cThis comment does not remove the fact that it is highly unusual for an agreement with a \u2018genuine\u2019 third party on the other side of the world (Dubai), worth many millions of euros, to be made orally and only documented much later\u2014after 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,\u201d the investigators concluded.<\/p>\n

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 (\u20ac112 million today) from Sonangol to companies she and her husband controlled\u2014in just two days.<\/p>\n

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 \u20ac132 million in dividends. \u201cNumerous (legal) persons cooperated in this perplexing sequence of events, resulting in Dos Santos fraudulently gaining access to \u20ac52.6 million from Esperaza\u2019s funds,\u201d lead investigator Van Andel concluded.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmismanagement\u201d of Esperaza Holding BV\u2014namely Isabel dos Santos, M\u00e1rio 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\u2019s \u201cmismanagement\u201d through deliberate schemes. \u201cThus, Isabel dos Santos, with the collaboration of Raikundalia, Manuel Lemos [who died in March 2023], M\u00e1rio 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 \u20ac52.6 million in dividends to Exem, without being authorized to do so,\u201d the decision states.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIsabel dos Santos, with the collaboration of Raikundalia, Manuel Lemos, M\u00e1rio 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 \u20ac52.6 million in dividends to Exem, without being authorized to do so.\u201d
\u2014 Excerpt from the Dutch court ruling<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Regarding M\u00e1rio Leite da Silva\u2019s 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 \u201cknowingly participated in the concealment\u201d of various documents that \u201cattempted to create the false appearance that the decision-making and payment order\u201d had occurred before Isabel dos Santos was removed from Sonangol\u2019s board. \u201cM\u00e1rio Leite da Silva also knowingly participated in Isabel dos Santos\u2019s plan,\u201d the judgment added, noting that he instructed lawyers\u2014including Brito Pereira (not convicted in this case)\u2014to urgently prepare legal decisions and even signed resolutions as an Esperaza director to authorize the dividend payments to Exem.<\/p>\n

Finally, the court ruled that even the investigation costs would have to be paid jointly by those convicted in the case: a total of \u20ac181,500, 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 M\u00e1rio Leite da Silva, Isabel dos Santos\u2019s former advisor and confidant. He spoke for nearly five hours, beginning with how he was hired and started working with Isabel and Sindika Dokolo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014linked to Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, her late husband Sindika […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,78,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-featured","category-others"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9274"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9276,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9274\/revisions\/9276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.negociosdeangola.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}