The businessman, married to Irene Neto, daughter of the first President, António Agostinho Neto, has been in preventive detention since September 2020 and is accused of several crimes, including tax fraud, involving amounts in excess of one billion euros, embezzlement and money laundering. capitals.
However, for his lawyers, who claim São Vicente's innocence, the main objective of the authorities was "to arrange a scapegoat for the Angolan people" and to seize the businessman's assets that are frozen in Switzerland, in a "context of unprecedented economic and social crisis in Angola".
On a website dedicated to this case, its legal team points out several legal irregularities and stresses that this case "is the epitome of the abasement of the defendants' constitutional guarantees".
For his lawyers, the owner of AAA Seguros, who has a frozen account of 900 million dollars in Switzerland, "has created wealth through the exercise of an activity that he legally exercised" and his case constitutes "the Kafkaesque chronicle of a conviction announced ".
Among the violations of the law, they point out the lack of justification for preventive detention, whose term was also exceeded, the "contempt for the health and risk to the life of the accused" who "is over 60 years of age and has several chronic diseases ", promotion of "a media campaign" against Agostinho Neto's son-in-law and attempts at intimidation.
According to the defense, on October 6, 2020, Carlos São Vicente was visited in jail by two prosecutors from the National Asset Recovery Service, without the presence of his lawyers, having refused to hand over his assets.
They also talk about the confiscation of assets without trial: "Many properties belonging to Carlos São Vicente or his companies were seized; shortly afterwards, they began to be definitively distributed, upon instructions from the PGR, by various ministries and other State bodies", refer, stressing that this distribution, before a trial is held, "means that the conviction decision has already been taken".
"The same happened with shares in a company belonging to Carlos São Vicente: after their seizure, the appointed depositary hastened to make public the final destination of these shares, assuming that they already belonged to the State", they add.
They also regret that part of the seized properties are abandoned, namely the hotel chain made up of the IU and IKA hotels, which "began to wither".
"Suppliers stopped being paid, hotel units stopped providing normal services, leading many of them to have closed and others continued to work only on minimal services, with large operating losses. Many of the hundreds of workers in this hotel chain have already were not paid and lost their jobs, leaving many families destitute", reveal the lawyers on the website.
They also point out limitations to the right of defense and deprivation of means of subsistence and assistance, stating that "never in the history of Angola has the law been so vilified in a judicial process"
"It is not by chance", they add, everything "happens at a time of serious social and economic crisis, in which power is weakened by the contestation of civil society" and needs "trophies" when elections are approaching.
According to the indictment, the businessman, who for almost two decades had the insurance and reinsurance monopoly of the Angolan state oil company Sonangol, set up a triangular scheme, with companies in Angola, London and Bermuda, which generated losses for the Angolan treasury, in fiscal terms, in an amount above one billion euros.
The judicial authorities ordered the seizure of assets and bank accounts belonging to businessman Carlos de São Vicente, and the Attorney General's Office also requested the freezing of bank accounts and the seizure of assets of Irene Neto, daughter of the first president and wife of the businessman.
