Standard Bank buys the Angolan bank shares seized from jailed tycoon Carlos São Vicente

Angola raised 208.5 billion kwanzas, about $224 million, selling a 34% stake in Standard Bank de Angola, six years after taking the shares from Carlos São Vicente.

Investors asked for almost twice what was on offer. Orders came to 403.4 billion kwanzas, according to results circulated on Monday, Sept. 28 by BODIVA, the Luanda stock exchange, and the general public bid for nearly four times the shares set aside for them. Those cleared at 50,000 kwanzas each, the top of a range that started at 41,220.

Standard Bank Group took most of it. Africa's largest bank by assets already owned 51% of the Angolan unit and held a contractual right to buy more, which it used to take 24% for about $152 million, lifting its holding to 75%. The remaining 10% went to other investors, leaving the Angolan state with 15%.

The shares belonged to São Vicente until 2020, when Angola's prosecutor general seized the 49% his AAA Activos held in the bank, along with his properties, citing embezzlement, influence peddling and money laundering.

He is serving nine years at Viana prison in Luanda.

The case Angolans call the $900 million case turns on an insurance company. São Vicente joined Sonangol, the state oil producer, in 1983 and became its director of risk management in 1999, the year Sonangol registered a reinsurance company in Bermuda. In 2003 Manuel Vicente, then chairman of Sonangol and later Angola's vice president, appointed him chairman of AAA Seguros, and prosecutors say the two men agreed verbally that year to transfer the whole AAA group out of state ownership and into his.

What happened next produced the number. Oil operators paid their insurance premiums into an AAA Seguros account at HSBC in London. AAA Seguros then passed the risk to the Bermuda reinsurer São Vicente owned, which kept the profit. Prosecutors put Sonangol's loss at about $900 million.

The District Court of Luanda convicted him on March 24, 2022 of embezzlement, money laundering and tax fraud, sentencing him to nine years and ordering him to compensate the state. His defence said the ruling was not unanimous and appealed.

São Vicente denies everything and calls the conviction illegal, unfounded and politically motivated. He told supporters last month that he faces kidney failure and sepsis without urgent surgery.

His money is scattered across three jurisdictions. Geneva prosecutors froze about $900 million across seven family accounts in December 2018 over transfers from AAA Seguros, and a Swiss court later reversed part of that freeze for insufficient evidence. Singapore's Commercial Affairs Department seized accounts at Bank of Singapore holding more than $558 million in his name. Angola took his buildings and 39 hotels.

He married into the founding family of the republic. His wife Irene Neto is a former deputy minister and the daughter of Agostinho Neto, Angola's first president.

Selling his bank shares does two things for President João Lourenço. It puts cash into a treasury squeezed by weak oil revenue, and it feeds PROPRIV, the privatisation programme meant to cut state ownership and build a domestic capital market. Lourenço has pursued a string of cases against fortunes built under his predecessor José Eduardo dos Santos, a campaign his critics call a political instrument.

Standard Bank de Angola starts trading on BODIVA on Wednesday, Sept. 30, the seventh company listed there. The group has operated in Angola since 2010, and Luís Teles runs the local business.