According to the presidential order, published this Friday in the Official Gazette, expenditure is authorized to open a limited tender by invitation to audit the Sovereign Wealth Fund's financial statements for the current fiscal year.
The appointment of the auditor will be made by the President of the Republic, according to the document.
The Sovereign Fund of Angola (FSA) obtained in 2019, the year to which the latest financial information reports, a net result of $234 million after two years of losses.
The result was associated, according to a note released at the time, with the good performance of international financial markets in which the Fund has invested more than 1789 million dollars on which it recorded potential, unrealized gains from debt instruments (bonds) and equity instruments (shares) in the accumulated amount of 189 million dollars.
Last year, the FSA had assets of $4587 million and equity of $3669 million, while net investment management costs were $4 million in 2019 and operating costs reached $15 million.
In 2018, the Fund had recorded a loss of $104 million, associated with the poor performance of the financial markets, in which that institution had invested over $1431 million.
The potential, unrealized losses from bonds and stocks reached a value of $162 million.
In 2017, the FSA showed a loss of 384 million dollars that derived "from the annulment of potential capital gains recognized in the 2016 financial year on assets valued at that date, consisting essentially of the Angolan State's concessions for the construction and operation of the Port of Caio, exploration of six agricultural farms and the forest perimeters, for a total of 435 million dollars."
The note states that only in 2019, when the new Board of Directors of the Fund took control of the assets, was it possible to complete the financial statements for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019 "thus being in a position to regularize the delays in the publications of the accounts."
Until March of last year, the new administration of the Fund was deprived of access to information on "alternative investments", which conditioned the completion of the financial statements for 2017, explains.
The lack of updated information on alternative investments, which represented more than 60 percent of the funds at the time, led to the independent auditor and the Supervisory Board refusing to comment on that year.
The redemption of the investment portfolio, the statement said, resulted in the transfer of financial resources worth 1945 million dollars, debt instruments valued at 67 million dollars, and a set of more than 65 investment vehicles/companies whose value was yet to be determined.
It was not until late 2019 that the process of surveying and valuing the assets was completed, concluding that they were worth $745 million.
The restructuring of the FSA began in January 2018, with the appointment of a new Board of Directors (BoD) and the creation of an investment committee that began operations in the third quarter of 2019.
In April 2018, the BoD terminated the contract with the previous investment manager (Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais' Quantum Global) and hired the international company Investec Asset Management, now called Ninety One UK Limited, which managed 32 percent of the Fund's assets as of December 31, 2019.
It was also in 2018 that the FSA began the process of rescuing control of assets valued at three billion dollars that were under management by Quantum.
The financial assets were managed by Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais, president of the Quantum Global group companies, who was released on March 22, 2019, after almost six months in prison, when the Angolan state announced the recovery of the money.
The Swiss-Angolan was accused of several crimes, including criminal association, undue receipt of advantage, corruption and economic participation in business. At the time, the Fund was chaired by José Filomeno "Zenu" dos Santos.
The son of former President of the Republic José Eduardo dos Santos, removed from office in January 2018 by the head of state, João Lourenço, was sentenced last year to five years in prison as part of a case that became known as "500 million".
'Zenu' dos Santos was sentenced for the crime of swindling by defrauding, in the continuous form, to four years in prison and for the crime of influence peddling in the continuous form to two years in prison, in a legal cumulation of five years.
The process has not yet become res judicata.
