Portugal Dominated Angola for Centuries. Now the Roles Are Reversed.<br />In a March report on money laundering and financial crimes, the United States State Department<br />said, “Suspect funds from Angola are used to purchase Portuguese businesses and real estate.”<br />Portugal’s foreign minister, Augusto Santos Silva, said<br />that the Portuguese judicial system investigated illicit investments without political interference.<br />“When I see Isabel dos Santos putting money into Portugal<br />because she has a number of big companies in Angola,” he said, pointing to her big stake in Unitel, Angola’s biggest cellphone operator, “it is easy to justify.”<br />“After, you can put another question: how she was able to create this company,” Mr. Amaral added with a laugh.<br />Luis Míra Amaral — who until last year was chief executive of Banco Bic Portugal, a bank whose biggest shareholder is Isabel dos Santos — said<br />that in Angola and some other African states, the same individuals tended to be both political and business leaders.<br />Rui Amendoeira, a partner at Vieira de Almeida, a Lisbon law firm hired by Ms. dos Santos<br />to help run the oil company, said he had no comment on the case or on Ms. dos Santos.<br />“We had it in our heads that Angola was a poor country<br />that needed to be helped,” said Celso Felipe, a Portuguese journalist and author of the book “The Angolan Power in Portugal.”<br />“And suddenly they were able to help us and to buy things that we cannot buy,” he said.
