The information was shared in Instagram's social network of the entrepreneur and art collector, who was married to the daughter of the former Angolan president, Isabel dos Santos, with whom he had four children.
On its Facebook page, the museum had already expressed condolences for the loss of a "great man of culture and worthy son of the Congolese nation who committed himself to the noble battle to restore African cultural goods to Africa.
On Tuesday, the funeral ceremonies of Sindika Dokolo, who died during a diving accident at the age of 48, will take place simultaneously in three places linked to the businessman: London, where the family used to live, Kinshasa, where he was born, and Luanda, where the couple met and where the Sindika Dokolo Foundation for the promotion of the arts was established.
The funeral mass and ceremony in memory of Sindika Dokolo takes place at Westminster Cathedral in London, England, at 10:30 a.m. At 09h00 the same day, funeral ceremonies are held at the National Museum of the RD Congo, in Kinshasa, and in Luanda, at an unspecified location.
Sindika Dokolo was born in 1972 in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo), son of banker Augustin Dokolo Sanu, and his second wife, the Danish Hanne Taabbel, starting his art collection when he was 15.
In February 2016, still with José Eduardo dos Santos as President in Angola, the Sindika Dokolo Foundation handed the head of state, at the Presidential Palace in Luanda, two masks and a statue of the Tchokwe people (eastern Angola), who had been looted during the armed conflict, recovered after several years of negotiation with European collectors.
In October last year, its Foundation bought and repatriated to Angola 20 pieces of art that had been taken from Angolan museums to foreign collections and prepared to hand over to the museum in Kinshasa the first Congolese piece recovered, according to an interview granted at the time to the Lusa agency.
In Portugal, the Foundation acquired the house of Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, in Porto, but, so far, the space remains to be dynamized.
Critic of the almost 20 years of President Joseph Kabila's regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sindika Dokolo spent about five years in exile due to the lawsuits filed against him in Kinshasa, having returned only in May 2019, after the arrival to power of Félix Tshisekedi, who took office as Congolese head of state in January.
Like Isabel dos Santos, Sindika Dokolo's business was being investigated by the Angolan courts following the revelations of the International Consortium of Journalists that became known as "Luanda Leaks".
Sindika Dokolo and the businesswoman are suspected of having harmed the Angolan state by millions of dollars and were seized of assets and shares in companies in December last year by a ruling of the Luanda Provincial Court.
In addition to Angolan justice, Sindika Dokolo was also in the sights of the Dutch authorities, who opened an investigation into Exem Energy, a company through which Sindika Dokolo and Isabel dos Santos own an indirect 6 percent stake in Galp Energia.
The International Investigative Journalism Consortium (ICIJ) revealed, on January 19, more than 715,000 files detailing financial schemes of Isabel dos Santos and Sindika Dokolo, which are said to have allowed the withdrawal of money from the Angolan public treasury, using tax havens.
Both have always denied the charges, claiming to be victims of political persecution.
Sindika Dokolo died while practicing a form of diving, locally known as 'al-hivari', which does not use breathing equipment and relies on the exclusive use of air in the lungs.
The Dubai police have declared that they do not suspect any "criminal act" in the death of the businessman.
