Search Results for: José Pedro de Morais

The Fake Assassination Attempt against Angola’s Vice-President

Why does the president of the Republic, João Lourenço, allow his government to be tarnished with fabricated accusations regarding the supposed attempted murder of his vice-president in the first months of his term? Why would the president allow the National Police and the Criminal Investigation Service (SIC) to use a machete as an official torture tool? Why does the president allow the judicial system, especially SIC, to be so inhumane, specializing in forging absurd evidence and incarcerating innocents? Why does João Lourenço allow the involvement of staff members of the Security House of the Presidency in an act of torture to go unpunished? Let us turn to the facts. Five citizens, detained more than a month ago, are accused of the attempted murder of vice-president Bornito de Sousa. The accusation was concocted from a banal discussion about parking the car which the five were in. They were barbarously tortured, filmed […]

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From a CIA Conspiracy Theory to the Murdering of Activists

The trial regarding the 2012 killing of Angolan political activists Alves Kamulingue and Isaías Cassule, which resumed on November 18, continues today. The central question still concerns who, in the chain of command of the state and the ruling MPLA, ordered their deaths? What is known is that the two had been involved in organizing a demonstration on 27 May 2012, which was intended to involve former members of the Presidential Guard and demobilized soldiers. After negotiations with and pressure from the Presidential Intelligence Bureau, the former presidential guards pulled out of the protests. A further question is why the alleged killers of both men are being charged in a single case, although each death involved a different group of suspects. A total of seven suspects have been detained. In the Kamulingue case, two National Intelligence and State Security (SINSE) officials have been charged: António Gamboa Vieira Lopes and Paulo […]

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Angolan Corruption Case Snares Irene Neto

Really? Carlos Manuel de São Vicente is currently a jailbird. On September 23 he was remanded in custody in Viana prison (Luanda) awaiting trial, where conditions might soon make him forget his ill-gotten billions. One by one, the bit-part players in the Dos Santos kleptocracy are being taken down, evidence of their crimes adding up against the long-ruling kleptocrat-in-chief who oversaw the outrageous theft of tens of billions of dollars of Angolan patrimony. It’s no easy matter to bring a former president to justice – especially one who secured a permanent amnesty for his actions – but the wheels of justice are turning inexorably towards his family, friends and former colleagues. Angola’s first President, Dr Agostinho Neto, must be spinning in his grave. None other than his own daughter and son-in-law’s names have been added to the long, LONG, list of “illustrious” Angolan politicians and officials accused of corruption, embezzlement […]

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Money for Nothing

Over the past 20 years Angola has been bilked of billions of US dollars earmarked for public projects that delivered little or no actual benefit to the country.  And an investigation by Maka Angola into a long-promised revamp of the country’s railway system, suggests the government is still being conned into handing over millions of dollars on schemes that fail to materialize. OFF THE RAILS For two decades under former President dos Santos, Angola repeatedly awarded multi-million-dollar contracts for complex projects to ‘johnny-come-lately’ companies with no track record.  Invariably these were shell companies set up by Dos Santos cronies that never had the wherewithal to deliver on their promises.  It was a scam by which the state kleptocrats diverted public funds into their own bank accounts.  Under reformist President João Lourenço, things are supposed to have changed.  But have they? A two-part investigation by Maka Angola into a billion-dollar deal […]

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Repairing Angola’s Central Bank

In the wake of recent revelations of mismanagement and corruption at the Banco Nacional de Angola (BNA), its Governor, José de Lima Massano, took to the airwaves in an attempt to defend his reputation and that of the bank. It was all to no avail, because many high-ranking officials have taken to heart the new Angolan President’s strictures against corruption and are willing to blow the whistle, backing up their claims with documentary proof. It’s evidence that should prompt the Attorney-General’s office to open an investigation. Maka Angola has been given a copy of the contract signed in 2013 for the rehabilitation of the central bank’s historic main building, signed by Massano during his first stint at BNA governor. As with other projects (like the much-derided Currency Museum), he hired the Angolan subsidiary of the Portuguese construction firm Somague to do the work. Somague stands accused of routinely padding costs […]

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Angola’s ‘Money Pit’ Currency Museum

The Banco Nacional de Angola (BNA), the country’s central bank, is housed in one of the prettiest colonial buildings that the capital city has to offer: a confection of Portuguese colonial construction in pink and white, consisting of two colonnaded wings which meet at a circular tower topped by a distinctive red-tiled cupola. The ‘wedding cake’, completed in 1956, occupies an entire block of Luanda’s Marginal, the gently-curving and tree-lined avenue which runs the length of the picturesque bay. Buried in the paved pedestrian square alongside the bank, some meters beneath an elaborate winged structure, is one of the city’s lesser known museums: the subterranean ‘Museu da Moeda’ (the Currency Museum). Opened in 2016, it may only have a single below-ground exhibition room with exhibits of dubious worth but this museum is worthy of a little more attention than it has received so far. The Currency Museum project, which began […]

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Sums Don’t Add up for Angolan Central Bank

Angola’s central bank, the Banco Nacional de Angola (BNA) has failed to produce its accounts for the second year running, with the current BNA Governor, José de Lima Massano, forced to issue a written explanation to the Angolan President. In so doing, Massano has brought to light a convoluted financial arrangement, sanctioned by one of his predecessors, in which the BNA unlawfully acted as guarantor for a US $200 million foreign loan for a private bank, the Banco de Negócios Internacional (BNI). Angola’s Banking Laws authorize the BNA to intervene to help a private bank only as a lender of last resort to inject liquidity during a temporary crisis, and only on condition that the private bank has sufficient collateral in non-liquid assets. The BNI case did not meet the criteria on any count. It is further alleged that the loan was obtained under false pretences, and that the BNI […]

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Oil and Cement Don’t Mix With Corruption in Angola

Angolan business practices are under the microscope again after a US$800 million  government-backed cement factory suspended production, and its recently dismissed CEO announced a sell-off of shares whose ownership is in question. An investigation by Maka Angola suggests the confusion surrounding the state of affairs at the Kwanza Sul Cement Factory (Fábrica de Cimento Kwanza Sul) can be traced directly to Angola’s ‘unique’ business practices under the current MPLA government, led for the past 36 years by President José Eduardo dos Santos. The Angolan colonel who founded the company has been sacked, the operating costs have become uneconomic and the Danish company LNS in charge of running the plant says it’s owed US$20 million in unpaid fees.  Legal experts have told Maka Angola that the uncertain future of the Kwanza Sul Cement Factory (FCKS) is directly related to its tangled history. Ownership and finances as clear as mud The origins […]

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Crashing Oil Prices, Propaganda and the Angolan Recipe for Disaster

Throughout the Angolan capital, Luanda, strategically located billboards announce a country being happily stewarded through development by the government. “Building a prosperous Angola based on solidarity”, is the boastful slogan across all ads celebrating the government’s achievements in all spheres of life. One such billboard celebrates “more electricity, more development”, in spite of the regular power outages. Such a massive propaganda exercise outside the electoral period has a precedent only in the early 1970s, when the Portuguese colonial authorities desperately tried to sell the idea that their rule was making people very happy, and independence could ruin all such great achievements. Nonetheless, this propaganda is in full swing at a time when the steady drop in the oil price on international markets could be good news for the Angolan people and a bad omen for their rulers. As a major countermeasure, last December the presidency decreed a 20 percent rise […]

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Isabel dos Santos’ Campaign, her Father, George Soros and Me

Isabel dos Santos Portuguese communication consultants, led by Luís Paixão Martins, have for several months been trying to wage a campaign against the author of this article. They have presented no evidence to disprove what I have revealed about the president’s daughter business dealings, particularly acts of corruption by her father. Attempted defamation   Instead, so desperate are they to find a way of attacking me, the author of Maka Angola,  that they have tried to find impropriety in his former links to the NY-based Open Society Institute (OSI), funded by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The same ruse has already been attempted without success by the Angolan regime’s own propaganda machine. Nevertheless, the deviousness with which the Portuguese public relations consultant took up this theme is in itself revealing, though more for the crass propaganda campaign than by its content. At the same time, the scheme offers an opportunity […]

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