The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth. Tom Burgis
a position as a gatekeeper to that territory – is by far the most direct route to riches.
Delivering a suitcase stuffed with cash is only the simplest way to enrich local officials via oil and mining ventures run by foreign companies. A more sophisticated technique involves local companies, often with scant background in the resource industries. These companies are awarded a stake at the beginning of an oil and or mining project alongside the foreign corporations that will do the digging and the drilling. Sometimes genuine local businessmen own such companies. Sometimes, though, they are merely front companies whose owners are the very officials who influence or control the granting of rights to oil and mining prospects and who are seeking to turn that influence into a share of the profits. In the latter case the foreign oil or mining company risks falling foul of anticorruption laws at home. But often front companies’ ultimate owners are concealed behind layers of corporate secrecy. One reason why foreign resources companies conduct what is known as ‘due diligence’ before embarking on investments abroad is to seek to establish who really owns their local partners. In some cases due diligence investigations amount, in the words of a former top banker, to ‘manufacturing deniability’. In others the due diligence work raises so many red flags about a prospective deal that a company will simply abandon it. Frequently the evidence that a due diligence investigation amasses about corruption risks is inconclusive. Then it is up to the company to decide whether to proceed.
In 2007, as its Angolan ambitions started to take shape, Cobalt retained Vinson & Elkins and O’Melveny & Myers, two venerable American law firms, to conduct its due diligence. Corporate records are not easy to obtain in Angola, even though any company is supposed to be allowed access to its partners’ records. I was able to get hold of Nazaki’s registration documents, and its influential trio of owners appear nowhere on them. But there were some clues. One document names a man called José Domingos Manuel as one of Nazaki’s seven shareholders and the company’s designated manager. His name also appears alongside those of Vicente, Kopelipa and Dino on the shareholder list for a separate oil venture.13 That might have raised a red flag for any company considering going into business with Nazaki: it demonstrated a clear link between one Nazaki shareholder and three of the most powerful men in the Futungo. (José Domingos Manuel, I was told by two people who know the Futungo well, had been a senior officer in the military and was a known associate of Kopelipa.) There was another red flag: six of Nazaki’s seven shareholders were named individuals, but the seventh was a company called Grupo Aquattro Internacional. Aquattro’s own registration documents do not name its own shareholders. But they are Vicente, Kopelipa and Dino.
In 2010, two years after the Angolan authorities had first told Cobalt that they wanted it to make Nazaki its partner, a crusading Angolan anticorruption activist called Rafael Marques de Morais published a report claiming that Vicente, Kopelipa and Dino were the true owners of Aquattro and, thus, of Nazaki.14 ‘Their dealings acknowledge no distinction between public and private affairs,’ he wrote. Nazaki was just one cog in a system of plunder, which meant that ‘the spoils of power in Angola are shared by the few, while the many remain poor.’15
At least one due-diligence investigator was aware of what Cobalt says it was unable to establish. In the first half of 2010 an investigator – we shall call him Jones – exchanged a series of memos with Control Risks, one of the biggest companies in corporate intelligence. Control Risks, the correspondence shows, had launched ‘Project Benihana’, an endeavour apparently codenamed after a Florida-based chain of Japanese restaurants, to look into Nazaki. Jones, a seasoned Angola hand, warned his contact at Control Risks that oil concessions in Angola were only ever granted if the MPLA and the business elite stood to benefit. He went on to name Kopelipa as one of the men behind Nazaki. No client is named in the correspondence. (In most such cases the freelance investigators are not told on whose behalf they are ultimately working.) Both Cobalt and Control Risks refused to say whether the Texan group was the client in this case. But what is clear is that the warnings were there to be found. At least one other due-diligence investigation I am aware of also got wind of Nazaki’s Futungo connections.16
By its own account Cobalt went ahead with a deal in a country that was, in 2010, ranked at 168 out of 178 countries in Transparency International’s annual corruption perceptions index, without knowing the true identity of its partner, a company with no track record in the industry and registered to an address on a Luanda backstreet that I found impossible to locate when I went looking for it in 2012.
When US authorities informed Cobalt that they had launched a formal investigation into its Angolan operations, the company maintained that everything was above board. With none of the fanfare that accompanied its cork-popping announcement of its big discovery earlier the same month off the Atlantic coast, Cobalt disclosed the investigation in its annual statement to shareholders. ‘Nazaki has repeatedly denied the allegations in writing,’ Cobalt told its shareholders, going on to say that it had ‘conducted an extensive investigation into these allegations and believe that our activities in Angola have complied with all laws, including the FCPA.’ Two months later, when I wrote to Joe Bryant to ask him about the allegations, Cobalt’s lawyer replied and went further: Cobalt’s ‘extensive and ongoing’ due diligence ‘has not found any credible support for [the] central allegation that Angolan government officials, and specifically [Vicente, Kopelipa and Dino] … have any ownership in Nazaki.’ Referring to its massive discovery a few weeks earlier, Cobalt’s lawyer added, ‘Success naturally brings with it many challenges. One of those challenges is responding to unfounded allegations.’
The problem for Cobalt was that the allegations were not unfounded. I had also written to Vicente, Kopelipa and Dino, laying out the evidence that they owned stakes in Nazaki, which I had gathered from documents and interviews. Vicente and Kopelipa wrote near-identical letters back, confirming that they and Dino did indeed own Aquattro and thus held secret stakes in Nazaki but insisting that there was nothing wrong with that. They had held their Nazaki stakes, ‘always respecting all Angolan legislation applicable to such activities, not having committed any crime of abuse of power and/or trafficking of influence to obtain illicit shareholder advantages’. The holdings had, in any case, been ‘recently dissolved’. If US law led Cobalt to pull out of Angola, Kopelipa and Vicente went on, others would be keen to take its place.17
In Manuel Vicente’s offices in Luanda’s hilltop presidential complex the only sound was the purr of the air-conditioning unit that kept the rooms at a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the taps of a hammer as labourers conducted some early-morning maintenance outside. A Mercedes and a Land Cruiser stood ready to part the traffic if the minister needed to venture beyond the tall red-brown wall surrounding the compound. The sole adornment on the beige walls was a portrait of dos Santos in a gold frame.
Vicente swept in, wearing a smart suit and looking fresh from his morning jog. If he was annoyed that I had named him as the beneficiary of a questionable oil deal two months earlier, he didn’t show it. Indeed, as Vicente styled it, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. If, while he was the head of Sonangol, he had knowingly owned a stake in the company assigned to be a foreign group’s local partner, that would have been ‘a conflict of interests’, he acknowledged.18 But Vicente, a man with a reputation for ruthless competence and a commanding knowledge of Angola’s oil industry, claimed he had not known that Aquattro, the investment company he shared with Kopelipa and Dino, had owned a stake in Nazaki, Cobalt’s local partner. When ‘all this news came,’ revealing that he did indeed own a stake in Nazaki, ‘we decided to quit,’ he said. His interest in Nazaki had been ‘liquidated’ the previous year, he said. ‘Today I’m not director and direct beneficiary of Nazaki.’
Vicente’s position was essentially the same as Cobalt’s: if there was anything untoward in the oil deal, they were ignorant of it. Vicente told me that he knew Joe Bryant ‘very well’. Their relationship had stretched back years beyond the formation of Cobalt to when Bryant worked for Amoco, an American oil company that merged with BP in 1998. That relationship, it seemed to me, might have provided a simple way to check whether Vicente and his friends secretly owned stakes in Nazaki. Bryant could just have asked Vicente whether the rumours were true. I asked Vicente: Did you and Bryant ever discuss the matter? ‘No,’ he said.
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