Africa’s Richest Woman, Isabel dos Santos, Plans To Increase Stake in Unitel

Africa’s richest woman, Isabel dos Santos, plans to increase her stake in Unitel, Angola’s largest mobile phone company.  According to a report by Portuguese newspaper, Publico, dos Santos (who already owns 25 percent of Unitel) and the other Angolan shareholders of the firm, which include Angola’s national oil company, Sonangol, recently sent a letter to Portugal Telecom to inform them that they plan to exercise their right to buy the Portuguese company’s shares in the Angolan mobile telecom giant.  Portugal Telecom owns 25 percent of the Angolan mobile network, Unitel, held via a holding company called PT Internacional.

In October last year, Oi SA, Brazil’s biggest phone company, agreed to merge with Portugal Telecom to create a behemoth trans-Atlantic carrier, but in the letter dos Santos and other Angolan shareholders sent to Portugal Telecom, they  claim that PT Internacional violated a shareholders’ agreement in the process of signing a merger agreement with Oi, and argued that they have a right of first refusal to acquire PT’s stake in the event of a change in ownership, and that the company’s merger with Brazil’s Oi triggers that clause.  Portuguese bank BPI recently valued PT’s stake in Unitel at 930 million Euros ($1.3 billion).

The letter read, “The merger indirectly implies a change in Unitel’s shareholder structure as the final controlling shareholder of PTI will no longer PT SGPS and will become Oi and CorpCo.”  Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s president, was profiled by Forbes in 2013 in a piece titled “Daddy’s Girl: How an African ‘Princess’ Banked $3 billion in a Country Living on $2 a day.  We now peg her fortune at $4 billion,  earned largely from lucrative stakes in telecoms (Unitel), financial services (Banco BIC), media (Zon Optimus) and oil firm (Gap Energia) among other ventures.

Source: Forbes