Luanda
– Isabel dos Santos, the billionaire daughter of Angola’s ex-president Jose
Eduardo dos Santos, on Tuesday accused the government of resorting to forgery
to freeze her assets last year.
The 47-year-old tycoon and her
Congolese husband Sindika Dokolo are accused of syphoning off more than one
billion dollars from Angolan state companies.
A court in the southern African
nation in December froze their bank accounts as part of a massive corruption
probe.
Dos Santos claimed in a statement
that a copy of a fake passport – bearing the signature of late martial arts
film star Bruce Lee – was part of the evidence submitted to a court that froze
her assets.
She cited among other alleged
irregularities on the passport that her birth date was wrong and her name was
incomplete.
“But the most ridiculous
aspect is the signature of the issuing authority: this is a reproduction of the
signature of Bruce Lee, the legendary kung fu actor who died in the
1970s,” said a statement released through her public relations agent.
Dos Santos said her lawyers
unearthed the falsified evidence which included scam emails, after they were
given access to the court documents last month.
‘False documents and false statements’
“Looking at the forged
evidence it is now clear that the Angolan state through the intelligence
services, prosecution, civil court, and Supreme Court has colluded and
contrived a case to obtain an unfair and illegal decision against me,” she
said.
“False documents and false
statements have been deliberately brought before the court.”
Dos Santos was charged in January
in Angola with a long list of crimes, including mismanagement, embezzlement of
funds, and money laundering during her stewardship of the oil giant Sonangol.
She was forced out of the job at
Sonangol just months after her father stepped down in 2017 and was replaced by
his hand-picked successor, Joao Lourenco.
Dos Santos built up a vast
business empire over the past two decades, with stakes in several Angolan and
Portuguese companies.
Her fortune is valued at $2.1 billion
by Forbes Magazine, which named her Africa’s richest woman in 2013.
A consortium of investigative
journalists, after analysing a trove of hundreds of thousands of leaked
documents, has also accused Dos Santos of looting state coffers during her
father’s nearly four-decade rule.
Dos Santos has denied any
wrongdoing and says she is a victim of a witch hunt.