Africa-Press – Angola. EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION: THE REVELATIONS OF MÁRIO LEITE DA SILVA, ISABEL DOS SANTOS’ TRUSTED MAN 3/5 || On several occasions during his testimony, the Dutch investigator seemed to not believe Leite da Silva’s justifications.
And he even emphasized that the Portuguese manager seemed to be everywhere, even when he wasn’t formally there, as he chose or appointed people to the top of Sonangol, managed a consultancy hired to restructure the oil company, was an advisor to Sindika Dokolo, was part of Esperaza, and so on.
“Next question. Have you ever been involved with Exem?” Van Andel asked, referring to Exem Energy (controlled by Exem Holding and Isabel dos Santos and Sindika Dokolo), which was born from Exem Africa Limited, to which Sonangol ceded 40% of Esperaza in 2007 for approximately €75 million. The Portuguese Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) and Angolan authorities believe that this amount “has not been paid and Sonangol has not received dividends for many years” (Amorim Energia alone received €330 million in dividends between 2005 and 2008), a claim already publicly contradicted by Isabel dos Santos, who asserted that the amount was paid in two installments: €11.5 million in 2006 and €63.5 million in 2017.
– Mário Leite da Silva (MLS): “I was appointed by Exem to the Esperaza board.”
– Willem Van Andel (WVA): “Yes and…”
– MLS: “I have never been compensated by Exem. I have never been a board member or member of any corporate body of Exem.”
– WVA: “Wasn’t he an advisor to Exem?”
– MLS: “I was an advisor to Mr. Dokolo.”
– WVA: “Who was the owner and ultimate beneficiary of Exem.”
– MLS: “And everyone knew it.” (…)
The Dutch researcher warned that they would soon have to take a break from the conversation, but first he wanted to know if he had understood correctly when Leite da Silva said he had been a consultant for Sonangol in 2016. Before confirming that he had, the manager mentioned that the company’s restructuring had been approved by presidential decree, subsequently including the appointment of Isabel dos Santos as president of the company, effective June 3, 2016. He also said that he had been coordinating the various phases of Sonangol’s restructuring project with the help of consulting firms such as McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, PriceWaterhouse, and the law firm Vieira de Almeida & Associados. “I was never a member of Sonangol’s governing bodies. I was a director of a company, Matter Business Solutions (…) We carried out a restructuring project between June 2016 and the end of 2017 that saved hundreds of millions,” he concluded.
– Willem Van Andel (WVA): “Mr. Raikundalia says he was invited [to be CFO of Sonangol] – and perhaps knows him – by Mr. Ivo Faria [a senior executive at PwC, PricewaterhouseCoopers].”
– Mário Leite da Silva (MLS): “Hmm, hmm.”
– WVA: “Ivo Faria worked at PwC and he was the one who told Raikundalia in April 2016, ‘Maybe being CFO of Sonangol would be a good place for you. Talk to Mr. de Silva about it.’ Do you have any idea about this?”
– MLS: “In April 2016, what I know is that the [Angolan] government asked Ms. Isabel dos Santos to present names to implement the restructuring project. And these names had no connection to Sonangol’s past, because Sonangol’s past is dramatic, as former president Mr. Francisco Lemos wrote in a May 2015 memo [Lemos was CFO and in 2012 was appointed president of Sonangol, replacing Manuel Vicente]. He took over in that May 2015 memo…”
– WVA: “And do you have this report?”
– MLS: “Not here, but I’ll send it.”
– WVA: “If you could send it to me, I’d be grateful. But my question was, have you spoken with Mr. Raikundalia about a possible job at Sonangol with a new team?”
– MLS: “I talked to many people. Ms. Isabel dos Santos told me: ‘The government approved the restructuring model and now asked for our help in identifying the people they will choose.’ What we did, what I did, for example, was talk to the various consultants who were handling the study. I asked the Boston Consulting Group, I asked PwC, Ivo Faria. But I don’t remember…”
– WVA: “Did you know Ivo Faria from your time at PwC or…”
– MLS: “Yes, yes.”
– WVA: “Because apparently Mr. Ivo Faria was also familiar with Raikundalia.”
– MLS: “They were colleagues at PwC. I never…”
Later that day, Van Andel would interview Sarju Raikundalia, who assured him that he had not known Isabel dos Santos or Leite da Silva before the possibility of being invited to join Sonangol as SFO arose. The Dutch investigator then asked if Leite da Silva remembered the conversation he had with Raikundalia. “No, not specifically that conversation. I spoke with several people. For example, I spoke with Mr. Jorge de Abreu, the name given to me by the Boston Consulting Group,” the manager emphasized. Such proactivity intrigued investigator Van Andel, who asked why he was always the one speaking with people for senior positions at Sonangol. “Because Mrs. dos Santos asked me to help her, to give her a list of names.” He made a point of stating that he had no relationship with the various people chosen to join the board of the powerful Angolan public company, specifying that he had always acted professionally.
It was time for a break, which Van Andel suggested would be only eight minutes. “Is that okay with you?” asked the Dutchman, before hearing, “Perfect,” followed by a slight lament from Leite da Silva: “I don’t know if I’m being too confusing in my answers.” The recorder was turned off and turned back on at 11:15, when the questioning resumed.
“And you didn’t know where the money came from?”
– Willem Van Andel (WVA): “Okay, so let’s move on to 2017. First, to what was later called the payment agreement, that is, the payment in kwanzas instead of euros. The first letter I see regarding this payment agreement is dated June 30th from Exem to Sonangol, and I know there was some discussion—I made some notes here, as you can see. I’ll use those notes now, because we’re going to follow the chronology. There was some discussion about who proposed what, and my question is: whose idea was it to make a payment in kwanzas instead of euros? (…) You see, it’s 75.2 million.”
– Mário Leite da Silva (MLS): “It’s 63.8 million, I think.”
After some discussion about the actual loan amount and who should pay or had already paid what, the questions again focused on Leite da Silva’s memory of how the payment agreement was handled. “During the spring of 2017, I was at Sonangol coordinating the restructuring project, and Mr. Raikundalia approached me and said that, due to Sonangol’s cash flow difficulties, it was important to receive payment ahead of schedule. Instead of receiving payment in December 2017, Sonangol would be interested in receiving payment before that deadline,” the manager recalled, with the investigator asking when this conversation had taken place. The response was: “(…) I was approached in—I’m not sure—April, May, early June [2017] and said: ‘Look, I’m not Exem. I need to speak with management and with UBO, with Mr. Sindika Dokolo.'”
Mário Leite da Silva confirmed that he had indeed spoken with Isabel dos Santos’ husband and even had several official emails between Sonangol and Exem proving the contacts, although none of the letters mentioned any interest waiver to Sonangol. In these documents, and according to the same source, Exem acknowledged a debt of €72.1 million and stated that it was prepared to pay in advance, but in kwanzas. Van Andel then warned that paying in advance was unlikely to be compatible with paying the debt in three installments, one every two months, as one of the documents stated. “I see three things. On the one hand, an obligation to pay €72 million before the end of the year. Then I see an agreement that says, ‘Okay, you don’t have to pay in euros, you can pay in kwanzas.’ Then I see, ‘We’ll pay a third every two months,’ which goes beyond December 31st. Finally, as you now know, no interest was paid, and Mrs. dos Santos, in a letter dated November 9th, released Exem from all obligations. So, when you look closely at these three things, it’s hard to believe that everything happened in Sonangol’s interest.”
– Mário Leite da Silva (MLS): “(…) I wasn’t aware of the payment itself. I learned about it later. I wasn’t informed that Exem paid 11.9 billion kwanzas on October 13, 2017.”
– Willem Van Andel (VA): “And you didn’t know where the money came from?”
– MLS: “I wasn’t aware, I wasn’t involved.”
– WVA: “Did you know that it wasn’t Exem that paid?”
– MLS: “I knew that Exem Energy BV couldn’t pay because the agreement provided for payment in kwanzas, and Exem Energy didn’t have kwanzas. It was an entity related to Mr. Dokolo that had kwanzas.”
– WVA: “So, there were a lot of kwanzas at Vidatel. Perhaps you know there was a worldwide freezing order [the Supreme Court of the Eastern Caribbean issued this order on October 9, 2015, in the dispute with Oi. Hours before the decision, the businesswoman managed to transfer approximately €238 million that Vidatel had in a BPI account in Portugal to personal accounts]? Did you know that?
– MLS: “It came to my attention later.”
– WVA: “But apparently Vidatel is not a company owned by Mr. Dokolo, but by Mrs. dos Santos.”
– MLS: “Yes, a company that belonged to Mrs. Isabel dos Santos.”
– WVA: “She had access to about 65 billion kwanzas, but when there’s a global freeze order, there can be a problem. So, apparently, about a sixth of that amount, 11.8 billion, was transferred to Exem Energia. She needed to get rid of the kwanzas because there were a lot of euros in Esperaza, and I’m just wondering if this was like, ‘Okay, you pay in kwanzas, we have access to the euros in Esperaza by paying dividends to Exem, so Exem doesn’t need to repay the loan in euros, but in kwanzas.’ Was this idea discussed?”
– MLS: “The only thing I know is the letters exchanged. I was approached by Mr. Sarju Raikundalia saying, ‘I need money, and I need money urgently.’”
– WVA: “If it was true that they had an urgent need for money, why would they accept this?”
– MLS: “Where do you see that Sonangol accepted this? Because what I see is a letter from Exem in September saying: ‘Okay, we’ll pay in three installments.'”
– WVA: “Yes.”
– MLS: “But immediately after, not immediately… three weeks later.”
– WVA: “Yes.”
– MLS: “Exem paid the 11.9 billion kwanzas.”
– WVA: “As you know, in early January [2018, months after Isabel dos Santos’s resignation] Sonangol returned the money. If they were in urgent need of kwanzas, why did they return them?”
– MLS: “I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t know (…)”
– WVA: “I can always ask: ‘what is the reason for paying in kwanzas in October when a month later €131 million were paid.”
– MLS: “Mr. Raikundalia should explain this and the urgency, because he needed to make weekly payments to refined product suppliers. In fact, the president of Sonangol after Ms. Isabel dos Santos, Mr. Carlos Saturnino, was fired because he failed to meet his suppliers’ obligations, and Angola was left completely without fuel. It’s important to understand that Angola’s refining capacity is far less than the country’s actual needs. The country depends on weekly imports. Another problem Angola faced at that time was the lack of logistics in terms of warehouses to store refined products in sufficient quantities. Thus, a significant volume of refined products had to be imported every week. Mr. Raikundalia was obliged to pay for these refined products, otherwise the country would be paralyzed.”
“Nobody asked, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?'”
Van Andel confirmed that he would question Raikundalia on the matter, but continued to say that he still had doubts, namely whether Esperaza had actually agreed to pay the debt in kwanzas and whether the entire intricate scheme of payments and connections between the companies—Sonangol, Exem, and Esperaza—had not raised objections from Leite da Silva. “You know that Exem has a UBO who is the husband of the person who wrote the November 9th letter? So there must be something like what we would call a conflict of interest (…), this whole situation is always Mrs. dos Santos, whether with her husband or with herself. If you look at the companies, isn’t she dealing with herself? So no one questioned, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?'”
– Mário Leite da Silva (MLS): “The people at Sonangol approved the dividends on the board and also the CFO of Sonangol…”
– Willem Van Andel (WVA): “Yes, what then?”
– MLS: “So?”
– WVA: “Are you saying that the CFO cannot be influenced by Mrs. dos Santos?”
– MLS: “You have to ask him.”
Van Andel said he would do so, reiterating that Esperaza’s management had to agree to the terms of the cross-payments. Leite da Silva responded that there were executive directors from Sonangol at Esperaza, and the investigator countered that those directors had been replaced before the terms of the controversial deal were agreed upon. The Portuguese manager emphasized that he had viewed the change as perfectly normal, especially since Sonangol’s appointments to Esperaza were common, and no one had ever asked him what his opinion was on this or that person whenever changes had occurred. The investigator seemed annoyed and asked: “Are you saying this is all normal? Dismissing two directors, appointing two others to their places, declaring a €131.5 million dividend, and announcing that the company will be dissolved and you will be the liquidator…”
Leite da Silva asked to refocus the conversation, asking if they could go step by step, but the investigator was too carried away and moved on to another question: how was it possible that the manager (and Isabel dos Santos) hadn’t realized there would be changes in Sonangol’s management after João Lourenço replaced Eduardo dos Santos at the end of September 2017. Leite da Silva reiterated that Isabel dos Santos’s eventual resignation would be a “complete surprise,” but the investigator picked up a Financial Times article from November 8, 2017, and began reading several passages that indicated that power was indeed shifting in Angola… even within the oil company. The manager insisted he hadn’t suspected anything and had always maintained the same behavior as a member of Esperaza’s board of directors – “I tried from the beginning to put Esperaza’s interests ahead of everything else.” Van Andel persisted: “But did anyone tell you, before or after November 14, why Mr. Carvalho and Mr. Veloso were fired?” Leite da Silva replied: “No. To this day, I don’t know. Perhaps Mr. Raikundalia knows; I think there was an assessment made by Sonangol.”
The conversation delved into the legal formalities of the two directors’ dismissals and other decisions made by Sonangol, Esperaza, and Exem. It briefly involved the intervention of lawyers Jorge Brito Pereira and Dutch colleagues, since Esperaza was a Dutch company. But the investigator again questioned the normality of the dismissals of Esperaza directors who opposed the controversial deal. “For several years, you had two people with you on the Esperaza board, and suddenly, they were fired. You didn’t ask anyone: ‘Why did this happen?'” Leite da Silva replied: “No.” “You weren’t interested?” the investigator insisted, and Leite da Silva again said “no,” justifying once again that the changes were normal, even if they occurred suddenly and without any email information shared weeks or days before with the board members. Van Andel continued to disbelieve Leite da Silva’s answers and asked him who had informed him about the new appointments at Esperaza. “Mr. Sarju, Ms. dos Santos, and Mr. Dokolo,” the manager replied.
– Willem Van Andel (WVA): “And when did they inform you? What day was it?”
– Mário Leite da Silva (MLS): “I think it was on the same day [November 14, 2017].”
– WVA: “And you insist you didn’t know what was going to happen?”
– MLS: “I didn’t know.”
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