"I think it is not necessary to be saying certain things, when we are in a position where we have a husband in prison and we have an accused child," said the daughter of the first President, Agostinho Neto, in Lisbon. the wife of businessman Carlos São Vicente.
According to Irene Neto, the notification that Ivo São Vicente received is not understood because he was constituted accused. "I don't know, they sent a notification to say to present themselves [in Angola], because they were constituted defendants. The date [of the letter] I think is 30 or 31 December, but it just arrived now", he underlined.
However, she guaranteed that her son, who has been living in Lisbon for some time, will not go to Angolan justice, "unless they come to get him," said the doctor, born in Portugal, who since last July also lives in Portuguese territory.
The notification to Ivo São Vicente "is very laconic, it just says that he has to present himself the day after he received the letter. Obviously, he could not present himself in Luanda. Not least because we do not have the means to pay for a ticket. to Angola and, much less, where to live [in the country]. Because our housing was also seized [by the Angolan justice]. Therefore, we have nowhere to return. We are practically exiled in Portugal ", he explained.
Irene Neto admits two hypotheses in the origin of the notification of the child. One of them is the fact that he is a manager of his father's companies or that they were part of the group he created. The other, for him more plausible, has to do with the fact that Ivo São Vicente "has been giving interviews".
"As a young man, he defends his father with some vehemence and may have said something that was not very well accepted. Therefore, this can be considered as a form of reprisal, pressure on the father, who is there and is knowing that the son was constituted accused ", he affirmed.
However, despite the judicial collaboration between Angola and Portugal, Irene Neto is not afraid that her son may be arrested in Lisbon. But, "in these circumstances, we are a bit hostage to what can be exercised as a means of pressure going forward," she stressed.
For now, in Portugal, Carlos São Vicente's family has some of the accounts frozen by the courts, despite the appeal he filed last year to lift the measure.
"We are insisting," he stressed. Because there was already a response to the appeal, the judge's instruction "was to defrost the accounts to reopen, some of them", not all, but the bank did not comply.
For this reason, "we have to resolve the situation," he said, because money is necessary, not only for the family, but also for Ivo São Vicente to maintain the companies he has in Portugal.
According to the order that ordered the preventive arrest of businessman Carlos São Vicente, he allegedly carried out "an illegal scheme" that injured the state oil company Sonangol by more than 900 million dollars.
According to the order to which Lusa then had access, the Angolan businessman, who between 2000 and 2016 simultaneously served as risk management director at Sonangol and chairman of the Board of Directors of AAA Seguros, a company in which the oil company was initially the sole shareholder, it would have carried out in that period "a scheme of illegal appropriation of shareholdings" of the insurer and of "income and profits produced by the system" of insurance and reinsurance in the oil sector, thanks to the monopoly of the company .
