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From Our Own Correspondent

Angola's Asymmetrical Billionaire

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Isabel dos Santos is the billionaire daughter of the former president of Angola and Africa’s richest woman. She claims to be a self-made businesswoman. But more than 700,000 documents, recently leaked from her business empire, suggest otherwise. The emails, charts, contracts, audits, and accounts in the so-called Luanda Leaks have put her under intense scrutiny by her bank and the Angolan government. But in an interview with Andrew Harding she batted aside allegations of corruption and nepotism. Escalating violence in Libya has encouraged a growing number of its citizens to flee and risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Sally Hayden has been on board a rescue boat off the Libyan coast. The 18 year Afghan conflict has killed tens of thousands of Afghans, more than 2,400 American troops and cost the US around $900 billion. President Donald Trump has often said he wants to remove the estimated 13,000 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan. That would leave more of the fight against the Taliban to the Afghan security forces. But in Helmand Province Nanna Muus Steffesen found that Afghan soldiers and police are already suffering devastating casualties. Famed for its traditional shoulder-shaking iskista dancing, mesinko-playing minstrels and live bands playing Ethio-Jazz, the Addis Ababa music scene has always drawn on a vibrant past. Now a new generation of producers and DJs are mixing Ethiopia's tribal, religious and jazz sounds with thumping garage beats to create a new form known locally as Ethiopian Electronic. James Jeffrey hit the dance floor. World leaders gathered in Jerusalem this week to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp - where more than a million people, most of them Jews, were murdered by the Nazis. The French President Emmanuel Macron warned that seventy-five years on, the shadow of anti-Semitism was expanding. Just fifteen years ago, the French Riviera city of Nice was home to over 20,000 Jews. That’s now dwindled to three thousand. During the Second World War, Nice witnessed one of the most vicious round-ups of Jews in Western Europe. Next week, it will unveil a memorial wall of Holocaust victims. One of the names engraved on it is that of Edith (Ay-deet) Mueller. But her teenage daughter Huguette had a narrow escape - as Rosie Whitehouse discovered.

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:04.6

Good morning.

0:05.6

Today, a glimmer of light in the pitch black, then shouts, blankets and lots of vomit.

0:11.4

We're on a rescue boat off the coast of Libya. We meet the Afghan

0:16.0

teenagers in slippers who are the first and last line of defense against the Taliban.

0:21.0

The thumping dance music providing an escape from Ethiopia street protests,

0:27.0

and how a silver coffee pot prompted a trip to the Coate Desieu on the trail of a murdered grandmother.

0:34.9

Africa's richest woman, Isabelle Santos, the billionaire daughter of the former president of

0:39.6

Angola, claims to be a self-made business woman.

0:43.0

More than 700,000 documents recently leaked from her business empire suggest otherwise.

0:49.0

The emails, contracts, audits and accounts in the so-called Luanda leagues, and put her under intense scrutiny

0:56.2

by her bank and the Angolan government.

0:59.5

But earlier this month she batted aside allegations of corruption and told Andrew Harding that she's the victim of a witch hunt.

1:07.0

There's no limousine, no security team, no hangers-on, none of the billionaire paraphernalia you might expect, from one of the world's

1:16.0

richest women. Instead, Isabelle doss Santos turns a corner in central London and walks towards

1:21.6

me. It's late afternoon, cold and grey. For a moment, I wonder if

1:26.1

she came here on the tube, or maybe there's a maserati parked a block away. It seems rude to ask.

1:32.4

We shake hands. At the age of 46,

1:35.4

Doss Santos exudes a cheerful, unruffled, unruffable, calm, alongside something

1:41.6

sterner, stelier, the ruthlessness perhaps of a woman who spent much of her privileged life being judged and pigeonholed and has learned to plow on regardless.

1:52.0

I'm asymmetrical, she tells me, twice. I'm not what you would expect. I'm not in that box.

2:00.2

We're meeting because Isabell-Dor Santos is is as you may have heard in some trouble

...

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