The Angola Papers: The Morality of Markets

The New York Times reports on how Western expertise helps a powerful African kleptocrat, Isabel dos Santos, launder and make money. She parties with celebrities who are either clueless or don't care about morals.

Wheee!! I’m partying!!
From left, Chris Tucker, Nicole Scherzinger, Isabel dos Santos, 
Paris Hilton and Chris Zylka (2018)

The NYT writes:

“Posing for photos at [a] May 2017 not the one above, that was a different party] event was Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman and the daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, then Angola’s president. Her husband controls the jeweler, De Grisogono, through a dizzying array of shell companies in Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands. 

But the lavish party was possible only because of the Angolan government. The country is rich in oil and diamonds but hobbled by corruption, with grinding poverty, widespread illiteracy and a high infant mortality rate. A state agency had sunk more than $120 million into the jewelry company. Today, it faces a total loss. 

Ms. dos Santos, estimated to be worth over $2 billion, claims she is a self-made woman who never benefited from state funds. But a different picture has emerged under media scrutiny in recent years: She took a cut of Angola’s wealth, often through decrees signed by her father. She acquired stakes in the country’s diamond exports, its dominant mobile phone company, two of its banks and its biggest cement maker, and partnered with the state oil giant to buy into Portugal’s largest petroleum company. 

Now, a trove of more than 700,000 documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and shared with The New York Times, shows how a global network of consultants, lawyers, bankers and accountants helped her amass that fortune and park it abroad. Some of the world’s leading professional service firms — including the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company and PwC — facilitated her efforts to profit from her country’s wealth while lending their legitimacy. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers, now called PwC, acted as her accountant, consultant and tax adviser, working with at least 20 companies controlled by her or her husband. Yet there were obvious red flags as Angolan state money went unaccounted for, according to money-laundering experts and forensic accountants who reviewed the newly obtained documents.”

The morality of markets and money

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has once again got its fake news hands on a pile of evidence of how corrupt many (most?) rich people are. Morals and human decency are simply irrelevant to these people. Among other shiny objects of evil, the ICIJ has brought us the Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers. The latter included leaked documents showing a little sliver of Vladimir Putin’s staggering corruption and that of dozens of other rich people hiding assets and corruption in anonymous offshore accounts. The ICIJ has exposed trillions in global theft among rich pillars of the community and playthings for clueless or immoral celebrities. Now we have the Angola papers. Same corrupt story, same human misery, different country, different kleptocrats.

The moral lesson is obvious and simple: The markets and their employees do not care about corruption. They care about making money. Period.

So, when Michael Sandel writes about the moral limits of markets and profits, this exemplifies how limitless but mainstream market immorality really is.

One can only wonder if Ms. dos Santos will sue the failing, fake news NYT and/or ICIJ for defamation. We all hope the backlash doesn't go any farther than that.

 Isabel dos Santos, the face of . . . . what?

Wikipedia’s dead journalist list