Author: Rui Verde

Carrinho and the Risks Angola’s Central Bank Must Confront

Carrinho has controlled Banco de Comércio e Indústria since December 2021. In August 2024, the competition authority cleared its takeover of Banco Keve, subject to central bank approval. It has also acquired 7.61 per cent of BFA through its subsidiary Congolian Financial. If consolidated, these interests could give the group influence over roughly 30 per cent of Angola’s banking market. This expansion comes as Angola faces heightened international scrutiny. The Financial Action Task Force placed it on its grey list in October 2024, citing strategic weaknesses in its defences against money laundering and terrorist financing. The European Union added Angola to its list of high-risk third countries in 2025, requiring European financial institutions to apply enhanced checks to relevant transactions. Such scrutiny exposes the gap between the government’s rhetoric and the credibility of its financial institutions. The Carrinho transaction brings two systemic risks into sharp focus. The first is the […]

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Carrinho and the Concentration of Financial Power in Angola

A statement issued by Banco BPI on September 3, 2026, says the bank has agreed to sell its entire 33.35 percent stake in Banco de Fomento Angola, or BFA, to Congolian Financial, SA, a Lobito-based company that serves as the financial arm of the Carrinho conglomerate. Completion remains subject to several legal and regulatory conditions: no objection from the National Bank of Angola; confirmation from the Capital Markets Commission that Congolian Financial is not required to launch a mandatory takeover bid; and Unitel’s decision not to exercise the pre-emption right established in the shareholders’ agreement. The price includes a fixed €345 million payment on completion, a deferred fixed payment of about €43.5 million, and a variable sum equal to half of BFA’s dividend for 2026. The deferred components are due in May 2027. This is not an ordinary transaction. Its implications for Angola’s banking system could be systemic. That concentration […]

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Angola: Where Votes Count

As Angola heads toward its 2027 general election, political debate has become consumed by familiar demands: rewrite the electoral law, replace the National Electoral Commission, invite more international observers. Each proposal is presented as the missing ingredient for a credible election. They all miss the central issue. Election integrity depends less on new institutions than on two simple questions: Who votes, and where are the votes counted? These are not merely technical matters. They determine whether citizens trust the result before it reaches the national authorities. Much of the discussion in Angola assumes that credibility flows from the top down—that better laws, stronger institutions or foreign observation will produce cleaner elections. Experience suggests the opposite. Public confidence is built from the ground up, beginning at each polling station where ballots are cast, counted and publicly announced. International observers can help, but they cannot certify every polling station in a country […]

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Angola: Unitel Sale in Legal Limbo

The public sale of shares in Unitel, Angola’s largest telecommunications company, and the operator’s admission to trading on the country’s stock exchange mark an important stage in a privatisation programme that has so far offered investors few marquee assets. Unitel is a rare exception. On that basis alone, the transaction deserves support. Yet the deal comes with a legal complication that should not be relegated to the small print. Half of Unitel was transferred to the state by presidential decree in 2022, and the former owners continue to challenge that decision in court. If they ultimately prevail, the consequences could extend beyond the state and raise questions about the title acquired by new private investors. Unitel’s prospectus says the offering is intended to make shares available to Angolan and foreign investors, with a separate allocation for employees under the country’s privatisation law. The offer covers 15 per cent of Unitel’s […]

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Tax Bill Risks Turning Every Citizen into a Suspect

Reading some of Angola’s recent legislation can leave one wondering whether the problem lies with the reader, the drafter or a lawmaker legislating for a country that exists only on paper. Article 45(2) of the proposed Personal Income Tax Code, known by its Portuguese acronym IRPS, states: “Financial institutions must also submit to the Tax Administration, by January 31 and through the electronic transmission of data, information concerning receipts credited to clients during the previous financial year.” The language may sound merely bureaucratic. Its implications are anything but. The provision would require banks to report every amount received on behalf of every client during the previous year. In effect, every sum entering a depositor’s account would be transmitted to the tax authorities — even a small gift from a grandmother to pay for biscuits. This is a striking example of how lawmakers, whether under pressure from international institutions or driven […]

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Angola’s Garbage Tax, Imported Folly

A Disguised Tax There is also an institutional dimension that makes the measure still more problematic. Angola’s Constitution provides for local authorities as territorial bodies organised at municipal level and endowed with representative organs of their own. The municipal assembly is to be elected by universal, free, direct, secret and periodic suffrage, while the head of the most-voted list becomes the president of the local executive.   Yet Angola still has no functioning elected local authorities and has never held municipal elections. The result is a clear democratic distortion: a levy is being raised for municipal purposes, but municipalities remain run by structures dependent on the central executive rather than by locally elected bodies accountable to residents. Instead of strengthening the local autonomy envisaged by the Constitution, the garbage levy would feed municipal administrations that do not derive their authority from the direct will of the citizens being asked to […]

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Words That Imprison: Caholo and the Crime of Public Incitement

Activist Osvaldo Caholo, detained for nearly ten months since his arrest on 19 July 2025, was sentenced on 27 April 2026 to two years and six months in prison for the crime of public incitement to commit an offence. Initially, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had also charged him with rebellion and public glorification of crime. Maka Angola examines the judgment. Freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, protected under Angola’s Constitution, are essential pillars of any democratic order. They cannot be treated as mere rhetorical ornaments to be activated or suspended by the State according to the political convenience of the moment. The conviction of Osvaldo Caholo, handed down on 27 April by the judges of the 5th Section of the Ordinary Criminal Chamber of the Luanda District Court, sentencing him to an unsuspended prison term of two years and six months for public incitement to commit an offence, falls […]

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Isaac dos Anjos Is Undermining Angola’s Credibility

Angola’s minister of agriculture, Isaac dos Anjos, deserves a peculiar kind of congratulations. By speaking so bluntly, he has done the country a public service: he has stripped away the pretence and exposed the national self-sabotage in which parts of Angola’s ruling elite still indulge. The masks fall. The choice becomes clear. On one side stand those who want a modern, prosperous Angola with a free and credible economy. On the other stand those who prefer the familiar fog of an oligarchic, clientelist and closed development model, condemned to delay because it cannot survive transparency. Dos Anjos’s recent public rebuke of the African Development Bank and the International Finance Corporation was not a diplomatic slip. It was a worldview made audible: the belief that Angola belongs, by historical right, to those who took power in war and kept it in peace, and that any external rule limiting their room for […]

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Angola Needs a New Constitution — Now

Angola’s constitutional order is not merely dysfunctional but economically distortionary. Since taking office in 2017, President João Lourenço has authorized an estimated $61.5 billion in public spending by presidential decree, without open tender or transparent contracting, frequently benefiting private interests linked to his inner circle. This is not an aberration. It is the predictable outcome of a constitutional design that concentrates executive power while neutralizing oversight. In Angola, the presidency is not anchored in a direct popular mandate but in party hierarchy, and its authority operates with incipient institutional restraint. The result is a system where political power and economic allocation are tightly fused. It undermines market confidence, distorts competition, and erodes the legal certainty on which long-term investment depends. If Portugal adopted Angola’s presidential model, the current president would not be António José Seguro. It would be Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, the top candidate of the most voted party in […]

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Carrinho: The Sanctions Shadow Behind Angola’s Industrial Showcase

Angola’s most celebrated industrial project was financed in part by a trader later sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom. There is no proof of wrongdoing by Carrinho — but the absence of transparency leaves troubling questions unanswered. After examining how public contracts and sovereign guarantees have concentrated economic power in Angola (see the first part of this dossier), this second investigation looks at the international ties of the Carrinho Group — including partnerships with entities linked to sanctions proceedings in Europe — and the due-diligence and transparency questions that follow. Carrinho’s business relationships with several international entities warrant heightened scrutiny, particularly given the lack of publicly available financial information and the complexity of the corporate structures involved. Confirmed links connect Carrinho to Manty AG, based in Switzerland and led by Maurice Taylor, and to Paramount Energy & Commodities, founded by Dutch trader Niels Troost. Manty AG appears […]

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