Tag: entrepreneurs weekend

As Angola Accuses Billionaire Isabel Dos Santos Of Fraud, Her Empire Begins To Unravel

SPIEF 2019: Russia's President Putin meets with management of foreign companies

Isabel dos Santos amassed an empire worth more than $2 billion as the daughter of Angola’s former longtime president. Now it looks like that empire is beginning to crumble.

On Wednesday—as the Attorney General of Angola held a press conference to provisionally charge Isabel dos Santos with embezzlement and money laundering, according to the BBC—a bank in Portugal where she has been a significant shareholder issued a statement saying that Dos Santos’ stake is being sold.

EuroBic, a small privately held bank in Lisbon in which Dos Santos has owned a 42.5% stake, issued a statement on Monday that it was severing its business relationship with Dos Santos and the entities related to her. On Wednesday EuroBic announced that Dos Santos had decided to sell her stake in the bank, which has about $8 billion in assets. Forbes recently valued Dos Santos’ 42.5% stake at around $200 million.

Dos Santos has come under intense scrutiny this past week after a number of media outlets, including the New York Times, the BBC and The Guardian, published articles based on the “Luanda Leaks”—a cache of some 700,000 documents related to Dos Santos’ allegedly corrupt business dealings that were released to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Dos Santos was appointed to head Angola’s state oil company, Sonangol, in 2016, when her father was still president of the country. (He retired in 2017 after ruling Angola for 38 years.)

According to an article in The Guardian, while Dos Santos was heading up Sonangol, she allegedly arranged for a transfer of $57 million on one day in November 2017 from Sonangol’s bank account to a Dubai company, Matter Business Solutions, run by Paula Oliveira, a woman who The Guardian says is apparently a close friend of Dos Santos’.

It turns out that the Sonangol bank account from which the funds were transferred was a EuroBic account. In its statement severing ties with Dos Santos, EuroBic also said that the payments ordered by Sonangol to Matter Business Solutions “respected the legal and regulatory procedures formally applicable . . . between this bank and Sonangol, namely those related to the prevention of money laundering.”

The BBC is reporting that an employee of EuroBic who managed the Sonangol account, Nuno Ribeiro da Cunha, 45, was found dead in Lisbon on Wednesday. A police source told the BBC that “everything points to suicide.”

Dos Santos issued a statement on Thursday saying, “The allegations which have been made against me over the last few days are extremely misleading and untrue,” and adding that “I am a private businesswoman who has spent 20 years building successful companies from the ground up,” and that “I have always operated within the law and all my transactions have been approved by lawyers, bankers, auditors and regulators.”

Forbes first dug into the murky origins of Isabel dos Santos’ fortune, with help from Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais, in an in-depth investigation in 2013. In late December 2019, an Angolan court issued a freeze of Dos Santos’ assets in Angola—assets that Forbes estimates are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of Dos Santos’ fortune—which Forbes estimates at $2.1 billion—lies in assets held outside of Angola, primarily in Portugal.

The natural question: Will other Portuguese companies in which Dos Santos is a shareholder follow in EuroBic’s footsteps?

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Kerry A. Dolan

I’m a San Francisco-based Assistant Managing Editor with a focus on wealth. I edit mostly, but also write about how the richest get wealthy and how they spend their time and their money. My colleague Luisa Kroll at Forbes in New York and I oversee the massive reporting effort that goes into Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires List and the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. The former gets me to use my rusty Spanish and Portuguese. In 2014, I won an Overseas Press Club award for an article I wrote about Saudi Arabian billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; I also won a Gerald Loeb Award with co-author Rafael Marques de Morais for an article we wrote about Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter of Angola’s President. Over 20 years my Forbes reporting has taken me to 17 countries on four continents, from the slums of Manila to palaces in Saudi Arabia and Mexico’s presidential residence. Follow me on Twitter @KerryDolan My email: kdolan[at]forbes[dot] com Tips and story ideas welcome.

Source: As Angola Accuses Billionaire Isabel Dos Santos Of Fraud, Her Empire Begins To Unravel

OxyContin’s Sackler Family Will Get Millions From A Ski Resort Operator’s Sale

Vail Resorts, a publicly traded operator of ski resorts, announced on Monday it would acquire Peak Resorts for $11 per share, all cash, which is more than double its $5.10 per share closing price, one day prior to the announcement. Peak Resorts operates 17 ski resorts, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, including Alpine Valley in Ohio and Hunter Mountain in upstate New York.

One major beneficiary of the acquisition: the Sacklers, the family behind Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of pain drug OxyContin. According to Peak Resorts’ latest annual proxy from October 2018, its largest shareholder is CAP 1 LLC, a company wholly owned by Sackler brothers Richard and Jonathan.

The Sacklers’ nearly 40% ownership stake, which includes preferred stock and stock warrants, is worth about  $87 million based on the transaction. Some of the shares are owned by the charitable Sackler Foundation. The Sacklers became investors in Peak Resorts as early as August 2015.

Richard is the former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma. His brother, Jonathan, is a former board member. Nearly every state has filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and its owners, including eight Sackler family members, alleging the company caused a nationwide public health crisis around opioid addiction and opioid overdose deaths. One lawsuit alleges that Purdue Pharma had brought in more than $35 billion in revenues since 1995.

The Sacklers, worth an estimated $13 billion based largely on the value of Purdue Pharma, built their fortune primarily through sales of OxyContin, a highly addictive painkiller that has been called by the medical establishment one of the root causes for the nationwide opioid addiction epidemic.

Purdue Pharma owns the patent for OxyContin, and is the only manufacturer of the drug. According to Symphony Health Solutions, a healthcare and pharmaceutical data analytics company, roughly 80% of Purdue Pharma’s sales come from OxyContin. Due to the widespread rise in use of prescription and nonprescription opioids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency in 2017.

The family used to be known for being generous benefactors of museums and universities worldwide, but their moniker has lost its luster. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced in May it would turn down money from the Sackler family, though it will still carry the family name in the Sackler Wing. In July, the Louvre Museum in Paris reportedly removed the Sackler name from its Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities.

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Angel Au-Yeung

Angel Au-Yeung has been a reporter on staff at Forbes Magazine since 2017. She covers the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs and tracks how they use their money and power.

Source: OxyContin’s Sackler Family Will Get Millions From A Ski Resort Operator’s Sale

What Super Successful People Do Over A Long Weekend And What You Need To Do Too – Jack Kelly

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The countdown is starting for the long Memorial Day weekend. If you live in a place like New York, you’ve been tortured by an almost uninterrupted run of rain, grey skies and relatively chilly weather for the last couple of months. We’re yearning for some nice, warm and sunny days—especially since we will be out of the office.

Let’s be honest, three-day weekends have recently become three-and-a-half or four-plus day weekends. By Friday afternoon, most people bolt out of the office to jumpstart their mini vacations. Others catch mysterious illnesses on Tuesday and are “forced” to call in sick.

The average person uses this time to go to the beach, sleep to noon, binge watch their favorite Netflix shows or take in a baseball game or two (or three or four).  My advice to you is to avoid following the herd of mediocrity and strive for success. It is too easy to let the holiday weekend slip by and gorge yourself with hotdogs, hamburgers, soda, potato chips and beer. My suggestion is to use this time as a gift to be proactive and productive.

Since I recognize you would rather take it easy and coast, please allow me to share the weekend habits of successful people that help them get ahead.  I promise that I’ll make it super easy to follow.

The first thing to do is sort-of fun. Use the holiday sales to purchase a sharp, new wardrobe.  It could be for interviewing for a new job or trying to impress your boss and colleagues in the office. Find clothes for the job you desire and not for the position you are currently stuck in.

If you are like me and lack fashion sense, seek out a personal shopper who can ensure that you master the look for the type of industry you work in and come across looking sharp.  While we are being shallow and discussing appearances, put down the frankfurter and go for a jog, bike ride or do some yoga.

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Take an afternoon to catch-up with new developments within your field. You can do this by reading industry-specific blogs, newsletters, articles and books. Then, go to the next level and read some books that will teach you something new and make you smarter. If reading is too much to handle, there are great podcasts and YouTube videos to watch that will help you with self improvement, learning about new topics and current events.

Set aside a few hours to get ahead with your work. Start new projects and take initiatives on things that you know will eventually need to do. Finish work that you have been procrastinating on for weeks. Send out emails and leave phones messages for people at work, especially your boss. They won’t answer or listen to them since they’re squandering their weekend with time-wasting nonsense. However, when Tuesday rolls around, they will be suitably impressed with your motivation.

Draft a game plan of what you need to do over the summer to move forward in your career. Set short-term and long-term goals. For instance, if you are seeking out a new job, search various job boards, update your resume, freshen up your LinkedIn profile, reach out to recruiters and practice your interviewing techniques.

It is important to reconnect with family and friends in a meaningful way. Put the phones away and enjoy their company. Listen to what your spouse and children are up to and what’s really going on in their lives.

Disconnect from social media, television and other obsessive distractions. Take some quiet time to assess where you are in your life and career.   Be honest with yourself because there is no reason to pretend that everything is going great if it isn’t. If you are not happy with your station in your professional and personal life, start mapping out a plan that will help you achieve your goals.

After you have accomplished these—and other similar productive activities—then and only then, should you take some time to relax and enjoy the time off.  There will be less time available, but trust me, you will enjoy these precious, relaxing hours since you will feel that you have earned it. Also, you will have a feeling of immense satisfaction that you took assertive actions to improve your life and avoided wasting the long weekend.

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