The Wealth Hoarders. Chuck Collins

Prelude 2020 The Theft of Angola

      Pedro Alexandrino stood on the site of his former home, a once-thriving fishing village south of Luanda, the capital city of Angola, on the coast of West Africa. “It’s all gone. Nothing is left,” Alexandrino told the journalist Juliette Garside, looking over a bulldozed spit of land of sand and gravel. “Now we are living in horrible conditions.”¹

      Alexandrino’s village, once on a sand bar called Areia Branca, was unfortunately coveted by the Angolan government of then-President Jose Eduardo dos Santos for a very different vision. Inspired by the man-made coastal islands of Dubai, the dos Santos government developed a master plan to construct a new coastal corridor of luxury homes, a commercial district, parks, and a new fishing port. Overseeing this development plan, called the Marginal da Corimba, were a number of quasi-public and private corporations that stood to benefit enormously from the redevelopment process. These included Urbinveste, owned and controlled by the daughter of Angola’s president, Isabel dos Santos.

On June 1, 2013, the 3,000 residents of Areia Branca were forcibly evicted by police and the presidential guard to make way for the government’s redevelopment scheme. “We had no warning at all of what was going to happen,” said Alexandrino. He had come home from work on a Friday afternoon and gone to bed around 11 pm. At 2 am he heard the noise and saw the soldiers and police moving to destroy the houses of the village. Those who resisted were beaten. Residents scattered and many moved to a squatter encampment on a former waste dump across the lagoon from their former village, building 500 tiny shacks of corrugated tin. Here they attempt to survive, living in horrible conditions that are rife with infectious diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, and meningitis.

      After 39 years, dictator President Jose Eduardo dos Santos was turned out of office. In May 2019, the new president of Angola, Joao Lorenco, canceled the contracts for the redevelopment scheme, charging corruption, “over-invoicing,” and “disproportionate compensation.” But the village was destroyed and the money is gone.

      Angola is a country with tremendous natural resources, including diamonds and oil. But it is also one of the most unequal nations in the world, with more than half the population living in extreme poverty. A colony of Portugal until 1975, post-independence Angola was plunged into decades of civil war and conflict. But, by the millennium, Angola was making advances in controlling its own economic destiny. On January 20, 2020, the world learned that Angolan Isabel de Santos, now the wealthiest woman in Africa, used her position to extract hundreds of millions – if not billions – of dollars in wealth for personal gain. Dos Santos, taking advantage of being the daughter of Angola’s autocratic leader from 1979 until 2017, allegedly used her public role as head of Sonangol, Angola’s state oil company, and other state enterprises such as Urbinvest, to enrich herself and family members.

Thanks to the Luanda Leaks, a disclosure by a Portuguese whistleblower of 715,000 pages of documents, we have learned a great deal about the unseemly mechanisms that wealthy elites around the world use to steal and hide wealth.² While great wealth was plundered during the colonial period, the use of shell companies and secret transactions are the newest form of neocolonial kleptocracy. In the aftermath of the Luanda Leaks, there were many photos of Isabel dos Santos throwing lavish parties at the Cannes Film Festival, posing next to US heiress Paris Hilton.

      However, more troubling is the Wealth Defense Industry, the tax lawyers, accountants, consultants, and wealth managers who facilitate this system and enable this looting process. These professional enablers are private companies, many headquartered in the UK and the United States, and they play an essential role in the global plundering apparatus. They are, as sociologist Brooke Harrington describes them, the “agents of inequality.”³

      While global banks such as Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and Citigroup refused to do business with Isabel dos Santos, a number of the world’s professional service firms were happy to oblige. Without the aid of the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, and accounting giant PwC (formerly known as PriceWaterhouseCooper), dos Santos’ wealth extraction would not have been possible. PwC acted as dos Santos’ consultant, tax advisor, and accountant, assisting with at least twenty companies controlled by her and her husband. McKinsey and Boston Consulting were hired by dos Santos to restructure the state oil company Sonangol. But these consulting firms were paid by shell companies based in Malta controlled by dos Santos, not through official state channels, an obvious warning sign for those monitoring money laundering.

      “Paying huge and dubious consulting fees to anonymous companies in secrecy jurisdictions is a standard trick that should sound all alarm bells,” said Christoph Trautvetter, a forensic accountant based in Berlin, to The New York Times.⁴

PwC claims it has terminated all work for companies controlled by the dos Santos family and begun an investigation. PwC chairman Bob Moritz told the Guardian that heads could roll at his company. “We’ll wait for the investigation, I don’t want to rush,” he said immediately after the disclosure. “But we need to move with speed