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Angola has renewed pressure on Switzerland to release frozen Angolan assets, with the roughly $900 million held in accounts linked to Carlos Manuel de São Vicente among the cases, Imparcial Press reported.
The money has sat untouched for close to eight years. Swiss authorities froze seven accounts belonging to São Vicente and members of his family in December 2018, on suspicion of money laundering, citing transfers of nearly $900 million from AAA Seguros to personal accounts between 2012 and 2019.
They have not handed the money to Angola. The Swiss position is that the illicit origin of the funds has not been established.
That impasse has persisted through repeated Angolan requests. When a Swiss court rejected São Vicente's own application to unfreeze the accounts, it emerged that Swiss authorities had asked Luanda months earlier for information on where the money came from and received no reply. The court noted at the time that progress depended largely on the outcome of the letter of request sent to Angola.
What he built
São Vicente was born in March 1960 and holds Portuguese and Angolan citizenship. He joined the state oil company Sonangol in 1983 and married Irene Alexandra da Silva Neto, eldest daughter of Agostinho Neto, Angola's first president.
AAA Group grew out of that position. Sonangol registered AAA Reinsurance in Bermuda on 1 April 1999 and appointed four of its own managers to run it. São Vicente became chairman the following year, after which the Sonangol executives left the board, leaving him as the only Angolan on it.
The group came to hold Angola's oil insurance monopoly at a time when annual budgets for petroleum operators in the country ran between $30 billion and $35 billion. It managed 22 pension funds, ran insurance brokerages, held 49% of Standard Bank de Angola, operated a network of petrol stations through AAA Activos and owned 39 hotels.
His fortune exceeded $1 billion at its height, with assets across Angola, Britain, Bermuda and Portugal.
The collapse
It unravelled when José Eduardo dos Santos left office in 2017. His successor, João Lourenço, dismissed the entire Sonangol board and opened an anti-corruption campaign that moved through the business class built under the previous administration.
Angola's prosecutor general seized São Vicente's properties in 2020, along with the 49% stake AAA Activos held in Standard Bank de Angola, citing indications of embezzlement, economic participation in business, influence peddling and money laundering. The seizures were made under legislation on coercive repatriation and extended asset forfeiture that the government had introduced as part of the campaign.
He was detained on 22 September 2020 and convicted in 2022 of embezzlement, tax fraud, money laundering and influence peddling. The sentence was nine years' imprisonment and a fine of $4.5 billion.
Detention and health
The conditions of his imprisonment have drawn international attention.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued an opinion concerning his case in 2023, citing denial of access to legal counsel, lengthy pre-trial detention, and inadequate food, water and space at Viana prison in Luanda.
His lawyers petitioned Angola's prosecutor general, interior ministry and Constitutional Court in March, warning of a serious and immediate risk to his life. The petition, signed by São Vicente from hospital, described surgery at the Clínica Girassol in Luanda on 17 March that was not fully successful, requiring a further procedure using laser technology unavailable in Angola.
His defence has also argued that he passed two statutory thresholds that should have secured his release, including reaching the halfway point of his sentence on 26 June 2024, at which conditional release becomes available under Angolan law.
Angola has recovered assets from São Vicente in several jurisdictions, working with Portuguese authorities among others. Millions of dollars remain blocked in Switzerland and Singapore.
Neither the Angolan government nor the Swiss federal prosecutor has said what would satisfy the evidentiary threshold, or how long the standoff is expected to continue.
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