Isabel dos Santos

Profile Overview

Isabel Kukanova dos Santos ([izɐˈβɛl duʃ ˈsɐ̃tuʃ]; born 20 April 1973) is an Angolan businesswoman, the eldest child of Angola's former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country from 1979 to 2017.
As early as 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.
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 Banco Comercial Português to a Russian bank.
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". 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. In 2021 a French court ruled that she was liable to pay $340 million to the Portuguese company PT Ventures. 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 November 2024 British Foreign Secretary David Lammy sanctioned Dos Santos along with Dmytro Firtash and Aivars Lembergs, naming all three "Kleptocrats".