Angola wealth fund head sacked in wake of Paradise Papers
The head of Angola’s sovereign wealth fund, José Filomeno Dos Santos, has been fired for having appointed an offshore company managed by a close friend to oversee the fund’s capital.
According to reports in the British newspaper the Guardian, Dos Santos, the son of the former president of Angola, was forced to step down after six years in his post as chairman of the board of the Fundo Soberano de Angola.
Jean-Claude Bastos, a close friend of Dos Santos, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in ventures in which he held interests when Bastos’s asset management firm Quantum Global was appointed to manage the FSDEA’s capital in 2013.
Appleby, the asset management firm at the centre of the Paradise Papers revelations, established seven offshore entities in Mauritius. It was via these that Quantum Global invested the Angolan funds. The Paradise Papers revealed how, in at least four instances, Quantum Global invested the capital in ventures in which Bastos held a personal interest.
The Guardian reported that, in one particular instance, $157m was spent on debt and cash payments to two other companies as part of an investment in a planned luxury hotel in Luanda, the capital city. The owner of both companies was Bastos.
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