Local firms are cutting ties with Isabel dos Santos as prosecutors in Angola seek to try bring her home to face trial on money laundering and embezzlement charges.

Ms dos Santos, billionaire daughter of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, was revealed in the Luanda Leaks to have set up a web of companies in Malta, many of which investigators in Angola believe could have been used to extract millions from state-owned companies.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, together with its reporting partners including Times of Malta, gained access to 715,000 documents shared by the whistleblower platform PPLAAF.

Ganado Advocates, who helped Ms dos Santos and her husband Sindika Dokolo set up multiple companies since 2010, confirmed they were in the process of cutting all ties with the billionaire.

Similarly, former Nationalist MP Noel Buttigieg Scicluna, who administered the bulk of those shell companies, said he was stepping away from the couple.

“I can confirm that which is public knowledge, namely my resignation, as can be verified from the website of the Malta Business Registry.”

Dr Buttigieg Scicluna was for many years a focal point for Ms dos Santos’s and her husband’s companies, many of which have very little tangible presence in Malta.

Global accounting giant PwC’s Malta wing has similarly resigned its role as auditor of many of the dos Santos companies.

Bob Moritz, the chairman of PwC, told ICIJ reporting partner The Guardian that he was “shocked and disappointed” by revelations that his firm advised companies owned by dos Santos.

PwC’s leading tax expert in Portugal, Jaime Esteves, resigned last week, citing “the seriousness of the Luanda Leaks allegations,” according to Portuguese newspaper, Observador.

I can confirm that which is public knowledge, namely my resignation, as can be verified from the website of the Malta Business Registry

The board of Eurobic, a major Portuguese bank in which dos Santos holds a 42.5 per cent stake, held an urgent meeting on Monday and decided to end its commercial relationship with the businesswoman and “people closely related” to her.

Eurobic also announced an “immediate audit” of bank transfers worth more than €45 million made from a Eurobic account to a Dubai company controlled by one of dos Santos’ friends. The transfers are under criminal investigation by authorities in Angola

Ms dos Santos stands accused in Angola of embezzling funds during her tenure at Sonangol, a state energy company.

Wise Intelligence Solutions, a Malta-based shell company owned by Ms dos Santos, was given an €8.5 million contract to carry out consultancy services for Sonangol, despite having never traded since being set up in 2010.

The contract was purportedly to help reform Angola’s struggling state-owned energy company Sonangol. Wise Intelligence Solutions subcontracted the work out to Boston Global Consulting and PwC.

WISL declared a profit of €2.4 million in 2016 on the back of the Sonangol contract as well as a contract with Angola Telecom, another state-owned entity.

Family jewels

Analysis of the leaked documents obtained by the ICIJ raises red flags in two other Maltese companies jointly owned by Angola’s diamond marketing entity Sodiam and Ms dos Santos’ husband.

The companies, Victoria Limited and Victoria Holding, were used to pump millions into acquiring 75 per cent of de Grisogono, a luxury Swiss jewellery company.

Angola’s investment in a jewellery company can be traced to a series of transactions in 2012 that quietly routed millions through shell companies in Malta and the British Virgin Islands.

Records indicate that Sodiam supplied the bulk of the funding to Victoria Holding and Victoria Limited for the acquisition of the jewellery company.

Leaked documents and e-mails show the terms of the acquisition were enormously favourable to Mr Dokolo. The deal gave him “full control of the management” of de Grisogono, while it was the Angola state that was pumping in the bulk of the money.

How did the jewellery deal work?

Sodiam, and a Dokolo-owned shell company called Melbourne Investment BV, set up Victoria Holding in Malta. Victoria Holding became the biggest investor in de Grisogono.

Leaked records show that on February 23, 2012, Victoria Holding received a €40.5 million loan from Sodiam. That same day, Victoria Holding paid a “success fee” of around €3.6 million to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands called Almerk International.

Almerk was owned by none other than Mr Dokolo.

The fee, records show, was for arranging the deal that left him in charge of de Grisogono.

Sodiam continued to lend money to the jewellery company after the acquisition.  The loans amounted to €108 million in total. The money lent by the state company was itself borrowed.

Records show Sodiam borrowed at least €88 million at a nine per cent interest rate from Banco Bic (now renamed EuroBic) in Angola, part-owned by Ms dos Santos.

In October, ICIJ media partners interviewed Sodiam chairman Eugénio Pereira Bravo da Rosa in the capital city of Luanda.

Mr Bravo da Rosa, who was appointed to the state diamond company in November 2017, said that Sodiam “has not profited one single dollar” from its investment in de Grisogono.. He criticised the deal that put Mr Dokolo in charge of the jewellery company and left Sodiam without a management role.

“It is strange,” Mr Bravo da Rosa said. “I can’t believe a person would start a business and let its partner run the business with total power to make all the decisions.”

By the time Sodiam pays off loans it took out to participate in the deal, he said, it will have lost more than €180 million. Sodiam says it is repaying EuroBic but hasn’t recouped its investment in de Grisogono.