The daughter of Angola’s longtime former president accumulated riches through embezzlement and money laundering, an Angolan court claims. To recover what was looted, the government froze her assets. Then Portuguese authorities followed suit.
Eight years ago, Forbes declared Isabel dos Santos the richest woman in Africa, worth an estimated $3.5 billion. The daughter of Angola’s longtime former president grew immensely wealthy in a textbook case of how to loot a country.
Now, with her father out of office, her empire is a shadow of what it once was, with corruption charges levied against her by her country, assets frozen by courts in three different nations and a lawsuit claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid debt in a fourth country.