The names, until now hidden thanks to the anonymity provided by tax havens, were revealed due to the new transparency rules introduced by the United Kingdom to identify who owns real estate in the country.
According to the Companies House commercial register, businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, accused of embezzling public funds and subject to an international arrest warrant, has two residences in London.
The houses in a private condominium in the exclusive neighborhood of Kensington are controlled by Wilkson Properties Limited, based on the Isle of Man, of which Isabel José dos Santos is the sole beneficiary.
One of them, an apartment, was bought in 2006 for 875,000 pounds and the second, a house, was sold a year later for 8.65 million pounds, according to the Land Registry.
According to the website "The Move Market", taking into account the prices of adjacent properties and the evolution of the market, the aggregate value of those two properties is currently 18 million pounds, around 20.5 million euros.
Isabel dos Santos is the object of an international arrest warrant at the request of the Attorney General of the Republic of Angola, on suspicion of "crimes of embezzlement, qualified fraud, illegal participation in business, criminal association and influence peddling, money laundering", incurring a maximum sentence of 12 years imprisonment.
In December, the Supreme Court determined the preventive seizure of the assets of businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, valued at one billion dollars, including bank balances and shareholdings in the name of the businesswoman, who was considered by Forbes magazine "the richest woman in Africa ".
In addition to criminal and civil proceedings in Angola, Isabel dos Santos has frozen holdings and accounts in Portugal, where 17 cases are pending, according to the Observer.
The British commercial register was also recently updated to identify Manuel Vicente, former chairman of Sonangol and former number two of President José Eduardo dos Santos, father of Isabel dos Santos, as the owner of two apartments valued at several million euros.
British Virgin Islands based company Riser Limited purchased the two apartments for 940,000 pounds and 475,000 pounds in 2005 and 2010, respectively.
But the website "The Move Market" estimates that today they could be worth around 6.6 million pounds (7.5 million euros) due to the privileged location in the Knightsbridge area, both a few meters from the luxury goods store Harrods.
The name of former strongman José Eduardo dos Santos has emerged involved in several corruption scandals, but has avoided criminal investigations thanks to the immunity granted by the Angolan Constitution to former holders of this position.
Vicente was investigated in Portugal for alleged payments to a public prosecutor, Orlando Figueira, who was expelled from the profession and sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for corruption and other crimes.
The case generated a diplomatic crisis between the two countries in 2018, which was resolved after it was separated from the accusations of "Operation Fizz" and transferred to Angola, where it awaits developments.
The former president of the state-owned oil company Sonangol was also mentioned in the indictment of the Angolan Public Prosecutor's Office concerning generals Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias and Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento.
The document states that Angola sold to Sonangol International Holding Limited, a company owned 70 percent by Chinese and 30 percent by Sonangol EP, between 5 December 2004 and 6 November 2007, crude oil worth a total of 1,598 thousand million dollars "without any clear benefit for the Angolan State or for Sonangol EP".
The former vice-president is also associated with CIF, a Chinese company whose assets in Angola have passed to the sphere of the State and with several businesses that have damaged the country in millions of dollars.
Manuel Vicente was the subject of a property investigation by the Angolan authorities, with a view to recovering assets, but the amounts recovered are unknown.
Another senior Angolan public figure with valuable real estate assets in London is Sílvio Franco Burity, former chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Tax Administration and former national director of Customs of Angola.
Burity is the beneficial owner of two companies based in the British Virgin Islands, Wyndham Mews Limited and Rolling Heights Limited.
These companies control a house in Stratford-upon-Avon, a village northwest of London known for being where the writer William Shakespeare was born in 1564, and a six-bedroom villa in the British capital, valued at almost three million pounds (3.4 million euros).
These revelations are the result of an analysis by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Transparency International, which seven years ago had denounced the lack of transparency in which offshore companies located in tax havens hold properties in the United Kingdom, raising the suspicion of money laundering through the British property market.
Since then, he has been lobbying the British Government for the real people behind these foreign "front companies" to be identified in British records.
According to the NGO, companies headquartered in "opaque financial centers" such as the British Virgin Islands frequently appear in cases of corruption and money laundering.
The Register of Foreign Entities was set up under the Economic Crime Act introduced last year, accelerated by the war in Ukraine, "to root out corrupt oligarchs and elites who try to hide money misappropriated through British real estate".
The deadline for the true beneficiaries of UK properties to be identified and registered was 31 January, but thousands of businesses have yet to do so.
The new land register has already served to highlight assets held by "politically exposed persons" (PEP), which Transparency International argues should be subject to closer scrutiny.
The next step, according to Ben Cowdock, responsible for investigations at Transparency International, should be for the British authorities to open inquiries about some of these people.
"We would like to see police investigations start into anyone who has been accused of corruption [abroad] and moving large amounts of money into the [British] property market," he told the Lusa agency.
Cowdock suggests that authorities proactively contact authorities in the jurisdictions among those people are being investigated.
"British police should start contacting foreign law enforcement agencies and start working together with them to try to find out if these assets can be recovered and the funds returned to where they came from," he stressed.
