Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s scandal-plagued richest woman, hired a US lobbying firm
with close ties to the Trump administration last month, a day after learning that a group of journalists, including Quartz, were investigating her empire,
records show (pdf).
Angola’s attorney general today
charged her with money laundering, and Portuguese prosecutors
have said they are investigating information reported in the Luanda Leaks.
The lobbyist, Sonoran Policy Group, is notorious for its work for repressive regimes and has ties to the Trump administration. Since 2017, it has earned $10.5 million from foreign governments,
according to OpenSecrets, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. Its founder, Robert Stryk, was an unpaid West Coast adviser for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, and has become
an exemplar of powerful new lobbying operations that have sprung up since Trump took office.
Sonoran are really well known as a Trump-tied lobbying firm, where they have made a lot of business on their connections to the administration. That alone speaks to one of the allures of that firm [to dos Santos],” said Anna Massoglia, a researcher at OpenSecrets.
Dos Santos’ two contracts with Sonoran, worth $2.2 million over a year, are vaguely worded, but oblige the firm to arrange meetings with “United States and United Kingdom stakeholders” and to “advise and place media” for dos Santos.
Dos Santos’ contracts with Sonoran were
first reported by Aaron Schaffer of Al-Monitor.
Quartz was one of 37 international media partners on the Luanda Leaks, which was led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and stemmed from a leak of more than 700,000 files made to the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa, a Paris-based advocacy and legal group.