Despite corruption trial, Trafigura still in the driver’s seat

They had queued the day before from the early morning to get their train tickets. Gathered in small groups and carrying small bags and children wrapped in their mothers’ colourful pagnes, the passengers departing from Lobito crowded into the old carriages of the Caminho de Ferro de Benguela. This century-old railway company began operating the line during the Portuguese colonial era. The line crosses Angola from west to east, until it reaches the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia.

In Lobito, an Atlantic port 400 kilometres from the capital Luanda, seats are like gold dust, as we could see for ourselves. But as the weekly train rolls on deeper into the heart of the country, passing through the dilapidated train stations constructed by the Chinese, getting one of these seats becomes a vital issue. Some people want to join their loved ones in a landlocked province, while others need a seat to go and sell their cassava, maize or groundnuts at the market in the next town. The Chinese company that overhauled the railway line after the Angolan civil war (1975–2002) had promised that it would transport 4.5 million passengers a year. It fulfilled only a tiny fraction of its promises, before being relieved of its responsibility for the railway, with the freight trains being assigned in 2022 to a “European” consortium. 

Under the name Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR) and with links to a legal entity based in the Trafigura building in Geneva, this consortium is led by the trading house and also includes the Portuguese engineering group Mota-Engil and the Belgian railway operator Vecturis. What they have firmly in their sights is the highly lucrative copper and cobalt mines – two metals that are key to the decarbonization of the global economy – located in the Central African Copperbelt, 1,700 kilometres by rail from Lobito. 

Trafigura’s co-founder Claude Dauphin, who died in 2015, had already laid the foundations for this project, which has now obtained the blessing of the Biden administration. In the early 2010s, the trading house began investing tens of millions along the Lobito Corridor via an opaque subsidiary linked to a senior Angolan executive, who is now subject to sanctions by the US Treasury Department, and managed by Mariano Marcondes Ferraz, who is in prison for corruption in Brazil. He is the businessman responsible for the fact that Trafigura is currently in court in Switzerland charged with having paid bribes on the Angolan oil market. 

In early October, Public Eye travelled along the Angolan railway line with the aim of discovering how Trafigura, despite its legal problems, was able to obtain the concession for the Lobito Corridor. 

A few sleepers away from the chaos of Lobito station, the port terminal’s mechanical excavators are busy transferring copper concentrate, loaded onto wagons, into the bowels of a bulk carrier flying the Liberian flag. This metal – used in electric batteries because of its high conductivity – comes from the Kamoa-Kakula mine in the DRC, which is owned by the Canadian group Ivanhoe Mining. The cargo is being transported by the LAR consortium, which officially began operations in mid-July 2024. 

Until now, metals from Kolwezi in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have mainly been transported the thousands of kilometres to a port, usually in East Africa, in an endless procession of trucks. With its hundreds of kilometres of railway tracks, the Lobito Corridor provides better access to the Atlantic from both an environmental and a logistical perspective (with a journey lasting 5 to 7 days rather than over a month) and, therefore, better access to the West and its industries. 

While the passenger train service is still being run – albeit so inefficiently that it is bordering on the ridiculous – by the national railway company, the advent of LAR could cause upheaval for central Africa. At the moment, the Kasumbalesa border post between the DRC and Zambia handles most of Kolwezi’s mining traffic. The region has significant economic interests: those of the Chinese conglomerates, which control 80% of the DRC’s copper mines, and of Western groups such as the Zug-based giant Glencore, which extracts 2.45 million tonnes of copper and nearly 40,000 tonnes of cobalt every year. Not forgetting the interests of local leaders, such as the former governor of Katanga, Moïse Katumbi, whose company Hakuna Matata operates a fleet of trucks. “They’re creating a new border post at Luau [the last Angolan station before the DRC],” remarks an expert on the region, who wished to remain anonymous. “Whoever controls the customs controls the whole of the DRC.”

The Biden administration has derived so much pleasure from the opportunity to get the better of its Chinese rival on its African turf that it has deployed its entire diplomatic machinery to achieve this. Its humanitarian arm, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), pledged $250 million in February 2024, before doubling that amount last June. Federal agencies, which are now only talking about “financing Africa’s economic integration”, have persuaded other investors to come on board, such as the African Development Bank and the European Commission. At the last count, the total amount of institutional crowdfunding raised had reached four billion dollars, to be used for modernizing the continent’s infrastructure, increasing the frequency of trains and stimulating the local economy. As for Trafigura, it welcomes this “more efficient and lower-carbon route to market for copper, cobalt and other metals crucial to the energy transition.”

This convenient alliance between the Biden administration and Trafigura is surprising. Firstly, because of the recent conviction handed down against the Geneva-based trading house by the US justice system on 28th March 2024 for paying bribes to officials from the Brazilian state-owned oil company Petrobras in order to obtain favourable contracts. And, more importantly, because Trafigura’s historical involvement in Angola is damning…

Trafigura’s reign in Angola

The war of independence (1961–1975) and the civil war (1975–2002) in Angola claimed a million lives, leaving the region devastated and the economy ravaged. Since its independence, the country has had only military presidents from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), an official state party loosely inspired by Marxism-Leninism. José Eduardo Dos Santos, who presided over the country’s fate from 1979 to 2017, set up a system in the 1990s that required foreign investors to join forces with Angolan partners with a view to promoting the creation of a “national bourgeoisie”, which was supposed to reinvest in the local economy. The declared aim was to create a virtuous circle of wealth and jobs. 

MPLA officials and their relatives – kleptocrats referred to by the Angolan population as “Marimbondos” (wasps) – were therefore offered shares in joint ventures with foreign investors. The most notorious of these was the president’s daughter, Isabel Dos Santos, who, in her thirties, became the richest woman in Africa and an operational director of public and private companies. “Influential people did not just grab money, assets and opportunities: the official policy is that they must be helped in doing so,” words written in 2015 by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, professor at the University of Oxford and author of the reference work “Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War”.

During the Dos Santos era, Trafigura became a key partner, if not the go-to partner. To win oil contracts, the Geneva-based trading company established links with military personnel in government positions. One of these dangerous relationships was with General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento. Better known in Angola by his nickname “Dino”, he was head of communications for the Angolan presidency, before becoming a special adviser to another general, Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Jr. (known as “Kopelipa”). And more importantly... he operated as an entrepreneur in his spare time. 

The general and the trading house jointly set up a network of companies under the umbrella of DTS Holdings, a company based in Singapore, but whose subsidiaries were located throughout Angola under the acronym DT Group (for Dino and Trafigura). According to the investigative outlet Maka Angola, Kopelipa was also a director of DT Group for a time. 

This joint venture enabled Trafigura to set up one of its most lucrative deals in 2009. Upstream, Trafigura obtained crude oil at low prices from the state oil company Sonangol (the volumes received have never been disclosed). Downstream, the trading house supplied Angolans with refined fuel via its network of hundreds of Pumangol service stations, a joint venture between Puma Energy, a subsidiary of Trafigura, and Cochan SA, owned by General Dino. Angola may well be the second largest producer of crude oil in Africa (with an output of more than one million barrels per day), but its refining capacity is insufficient to meet the needs of its growing population (currently 38 million people). This captive market was already valued at $3.3 billion per year in 2011.

Read the Public Eye investigation “Trafigura’s business in Angola”, published in 2013

The partnership with General Dino caused Trafigura problems. This was because he was a “PEP” (politically exposed person). In other words, Trafigura and the banks that financed the trading activities were involved with a business partner with whom they had to adopt a cautious approach, applying due diligence, especially since he was combining public functions with commercial activities in his own interest. 

Certain subsidiaries of DT Group, as well as its historical intermediaries, have allowed Trafigura to gain a foothold in the Lobito Corridor and facilitated its acquisition of the concession. We will return to this subject later.

Trafigura’s trial in Switzerland

On 2nd December 2024, the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona, Switzerland, will examine a case concerning bribes paid to the director of Sonangol’s distribution subsidiary, Paulo Gouveia Júnior. Between August 2009 and July 2011, Gouveia received – via his offshore entity Wyland Group, in his account with the Geneva branch of Crédit Agricole ( today CA Indosuez) – close to €4 million in 16 transfers from ConsultCo Trading Ltd., a company based in the British Virgin Islands. Some €350,000 were directly transferred by an offshore company in the hands of Mariano Marcondes Ferraz (see chapter 5), Enelmer International LTD, on July 10, 2009. Not to mention more than $604,000 given to him in cash. The purpose of these payments? The signing of eight ship chartering contracts and one bunkering contract in favour of Sonangol Distribuidora. As a result of these bribes, Trafigura was said to have made an illegal profit of $143.7 million, according to the calculations of the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland.

ConsultCo Trading Ltd. is owned by a former Trafigura employee, responsible for acquiring oil contracts in Angola, but also in the Republic of Congo, where he fostered excellent relations with the son of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, according to the specialist media outlet Africa Intelligence. He is also the owner and co-director of the Corsier-Port shipyard, near Geneva, where the boats of several Trafigura traders are moored. 

This is an embarrassing case for the multinational, which has sought to negotiate a deal with the Swiss prosecutors. Apart from the unprecedented nature of the large-scale unravelling of a trading house in court, the trial will also provide an opportunity to scrutinize the responsibility of a senior Trafigura executive, Michael Wainwright, in relation to the corrupt scheme. 

The former Chief Operating Officer and a member of the group’s Board of Directors, barely in his fifties was given early retirement at the start of 2024. He is a millionaire who is passionate about motor racing and was one of the first employees (number 41) at the trading house founded in 1993, where he launched his career as an accountant. Described as cold and methodical, he was officially in charge of Trafigura’s operations. According to the Bloomberg agency, he was responsible for approving personally even the smallest expense claims submitted by the company’s employees. This “perfectionist” streak has made him a target in the various legal proceedings being conducted against Trafigura. When the trial was announced in December 2023, Mike Wainwright, presumed innocent, said he was ready to defend himself in court.

The Bellinzona trial will, above all, provide an opportunity to scrutinize what is described by several sources as Trafigura’s “double accounting”. And, in particular, to examine the role played by ConsultCo Trading Ltd., which received numerous payments from Trafigura during the same period. According to documents seen by Public Eye, this offshore entity received $51.8 million from Trafigura Beheer BV Amsterdam in 56 transactions made between 9th January 2009 and 1st September 2011. For what purpose? This is one of the questions that remains unanswered even now. A contract referred to as an “intermediary agreement”, which is scarce on detail, linked ConsultCo Trading Ltd with a subsidiary of DT Group, partially owned by Dino at that time,  “in order to give an appearance of legitimacy to the transfers of funds [...], which were very largely intended to corrupt Gouveia”, according to the MPC's indictment. When contacted by us, Trafigura referred to its press release issued at the end of December 2023, stressing that it had sought to find an amicable resolution with the Swiss federal prosecutor.

At that time, the trading house had two projects running in Angola: one reopening iron mines (via DT Group) and the other operating a railway line crossing the country from west to east in the direction of the Central African Copperbelt, the Lobito Corridor. It was also in the early 2010s that, according to official Angolan documents, Trafigura promised to invest – via a subsidiary of DT Group – tens of millions of dollars along the route.

When questioned, none of the passengers on the train rolling quietly from station to station at a speed of 40 km/h had heard of Trafigura or its trial, not even the men wearing the jackets of the Lobito Atlantic Railway consortium. They were more keen to talk about Joe Biden’s visit to Luanda, scheduled for the following week and then postponed until early December. This will be the Democratic president’s first visit to Africa and the first visit by a US president to Angola. 

 After being ostracized by the United States, Angola is once again entering the game of high-stakes diplomacy. The surprise victory of João Lourenço (also from the MPLA) in the 2017 presidential elections had the twofold effect of bringing down the Dos Santos clan – bogged down in legal proceedings for embezzlement and then hit by the death of the family patriarch in 2022 in Barcelona – and of putting Angola back on the radar of Western governments. Following his election, Lourenço launched an anti-corruption campaign, removed Generals Dino and Kopelipa from the presidential circle and put an end to Angolan partnerships that were mandatory for foreign investors. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira recalled: “When Lourenço came to power, Angolans assumed that he would put an end to Trafigura’s racketeering. The company was then viewed as a legacy of the Dos Santos regime. In fact, he ended its monopoly on the import of petroleum products by opening this market to tendering procedures.” 

On the geopolitical front, João Lourenço was on the lookout for new strategic partners, while the agreements concluded with Beijing as part of the New Silk Road (nowadays referred to as the “Belt and Road Initiative”) were being criticized around the world. Some infrastructures, built almost exclusively by Chinese labour, have collapsed or turned out to be unusable or useless, as borne out by the numerous dilapidated stations along the Corridor. In addition, financial loans – repayable in raw materials – have often ended up, when prices fell in 2015 and 2020, stifling the extractive economies. This has particularly affected Angola, which has borrowed $45 billion from Chinese lenders since 2002, i.e. half of its gross domestic product. The country, which depends on hydrocarbons for 94% of its exports, still owes the Chinese $17 billion.

The Biden administration is therefore trying to capitalize on this discontent. The Lobito Corridor is its “flagship” project, which should allow it to gain a foothold in central Africa by offering an alternative to Chinese control. The deal represents for Luanda “a triple opportunity for economic diversification; not focused on oil exploitation, outside the capital and, above all, maintaining an equal distance between Washington and Beijing,” explains Heitor Carvalho. Carvalho, who is the director of the economic research centre at the Lusíada University of Angola and has participated in very lively debates on the Lobito Corridor, has no doubt about the comparative benefit of the Angolan railway route compared to the alternative projects ( a Tanzanian corridor or a Congolese port) and the economic profitability of its mining sector. “There are currently two convoys of minerals a week, when there could be two a day,” he says.

Looking at the degree of dilapidation of the infrastructure and the now useless scrap metal that litters the route, it is difficult to imagine such a frequent rail service. When no trains are running, the inhabitants of rural municipalities in the interior of the country very often walk along the railway line. It is up to the consortium and Trafigura – which have managed to establish themselves as institutional players in the region, alongside the development banks – to modernize this route.

A Pandora‘s box called Mariano

Trafigura’s Angolan stronghold seemed to be seriously under threat. Barely a year before the political transition in Angola, an event took place that triggered a chain reaction, the repercussions of which are still being felt to this day by the Geneva-based trading house. This was the arrest, at São Paulo airport on 26th October 2016, of a certain Mariano Marcondes Ferraz, in the context of the “Petrobras” scandal in Brazil. A member of Trafigura’s management team at that time, the businessman was convicted – by the Brazilian courts in 2018 (10 years in prison) and by the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland in 2019 (more than one million in an equivalent claim) – of paying bribes to a senior official from the Brazilian state oil company. 

However, Mariano Marcondes Ferraz was also prospecting on behalf of Trafigura in Angola, where he was operational director of DT Group, the joint venture set up by the Geneva-based trading company and General Dino. In exchange for a reduction in his sentence, the Brazilian dished the dirt, revealing to the courts a number of dubious financial flows... particularly in Angola. Trafigura tried to have this testimony invalidated in court, according to the Swiss judicial outlet Gotham City.

In July 2020, Switzerland opened a criminal investigation “against persons unknown” on suspicion of bribery of public officials in Angola. Since then, Trafigura has been keen to have a clear-out. In a series of shareholder transactions which took place between March 2020 and September 2021, the trading house “purged” its assets of Dino, which had become too problematic. It started off by buying the general’s shares (via his Cochan companies) in Puma Energy and DTS Holdings Pte Ltd. At the same time, Trafigura exchanged all of Sonangol Holdings’ shares in Puma Energy (estimated to be worth $600 million) and sold its Angolan assets, including its valuable Pumangol service stations. 

The alert level rose again on 9th December 2021. The US Treasury Department then placed General Dino, four of his companies (including Cochan S.A. and Cochan Holdings S.A.), his superior, General Kopelipa, and Isabel Dos Santos, on its “specially designated nationals” list. This therefore meant a ban on doing business with the two generals and the president’s daughter, who also had their assets frozen. But Trafigura already seemed to have accomplished its mission by promising to disengage from the country and cutting its ties with its corrupt elites. As for Dino, he had increased his wealth by several hundred million dollars in these suspect transactions and disappeared from Angola.

In late 2023, the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland announced that it had filed an indictment against Trafigura and three individuals, including Mike Wainwright, in connection with the Angolan oil sector when the country was ruled by the Dos Santos family. The MPC's indictment mentions overnight stays - paid for by Trafigura to Paulo Gouveia Junior - in two 5-star hotels in Geneva, a trip to the Rio Carnival attended by Claude Dauphin, Mariano Marcondes Ferraz, as well as senior Angolan civil servants Manuel Vicente and General Dino, and payment for a summer camp in Gstaad for the latter's daughter. This seemed like an indication that Trafigura’s reign in Angola had come to an end. 

In Luanda, the Torre Caravela building, where all the joint ventures set up by General Dino and Trafigura were based, has not yet removed its DT Group signage…

The diesel locomotive continues to make its way along the Lobito Corridor through the central provinces of Angola. After it passes through the stations at Lobito and Catumbela, an inhospitable desert landscape unfolds, with its steep cliffs and earth that reflects the sun. One passenger on board, the tireless Marcelino Kienze Macole, 68, is making this trip for the second time this week. After leaving the Congolese mining area of Lubumbashi, the vice-president of the Angola-DRC Chamber of Commerce and Industry went to Lobito to highlight the fact that “the money should not stop at the consortium”, but should also benefit local communities. 

During a one-hour stop at Huambo station, wearing a badge in the Angolan colours on his jacket, he took advantage of foreign journalists being present to explain his approach. “Peace is needed in the region to make the Corridor a profitable venture,” he maintained. “The war has destroyed the infrastructure and isolated the people who live here for years. Now they have a right to develop their region.” Yet the Lobito Corridor of Marcelino Kienze Macole and the other Angolans on board seems to be taking an increasingly divergent route from that of the consortium led by Trafigura.

Lobito, Catumbela, Huambo and Luau, the end station on the line: these were the four crossing points where Trafigura launched investment projects in railway infrastructure nearly 15 years ago, paving the way for an initial attempt to obtain the concession for the Corridor, which was personally overseen by Trafigura’s co-founder, Claude Dauphin. More worrying still for Trafigura is the fact that it was the intermediary Mariano Marcondes Ferraz himself – sentenced to 10 years in prison for corruption in Brazil – who was in charge of these initial investments, as confirmed by Public Eye.

At the time, Trafigura was using a discreet “two-headed” company called Angofret, of which no trace can be found today. Angofret Holdings (BVI) Ltd., established on 24th December 2009 in the British Virgin Islands – via the services of the law firm Appleby, at the heart of the “Paradise Papers” data leak – was created during the same period (2009–2010) as most of DT Group’s joint ventures. This legal entity, 99% owned by Cochan S.A., with the remaining 1% being held by a cousin of General Dino, is indirectly linked to Trafigura via DTH Investments (DT Group), a company based in the Bahamas. By 2018 at the latest, Trafigura had taken control of it.

The Caribbean company Angofret Holdings (BVI) Ltd. in particular, together with its Angolan shareholders, which had good connections with the local government, allowed Trafigura to gain an initial foothold in the Lobito Corridor. On 1st September 2010, the BVI entity founded, together with Dino’s cousin and the Republic of Angola, Angofret Ltda, the second company of that name, “in their best interest and in the greater interest of the Republic of Angola”. This company, which was soon based in the DT Group’s Torre Caravela building, was under the sole management of Mariano Marcondes Ferraz.

“Mariano Marcondes Ferraz did effectively attend meetings on the Angolan project, but mostly in Geneva where he was based,” confirms Eric Peiffer, managing director of Vecturis, a railway operator and Trafigura’s partner in the consortium, adding that he “learned through the press about the arrest of Mariano Marcondes Ferraz in Brazil”.

Therefore, it was this former Trafigura executive, who had fallen out of favour during the Petrobras affair, who was then officially in charge of the railway investments of the Geneva-based trading house, through DT Group. In specific terms, this involved the construction of four logistics terminals along the railway line in the early 2010s. This is corroborated by two presidential decrees published in Angola’s official gazette “Diário Da República”.

The first investment made in September 2010, amounting to more than $87.5 million and split into two tranches, was intended for the construction of two multifunctional logistics platforms in Huambo and Lobito, which is close to the Atlantic port where tons of copper and cobalt have to be delivered, as well as a storage centre in Catumbela. Dino’s cousin only contributed $50,000 to this figure of many millions of dollars. There is also another juicy tidbit of information. Both Dino’s cousin and Angofret Holdings (BVI) Ltd. were represented by a lawyer who, at the time, had an email address hosted by Trafigura and, more importantly, who happened to be the great-niece of General Kopelipa, according to Angolan journalist Nelson Sul. This is the sole mention of Trafigura’s name in the contract.

The second investment was intended for the construction of two multimodal platforms in Huambo and Luena. The contract, dated 29th October 2014, concerned approximately $52.7 million in investments. Dino’s cousin had disappeared, but Mariano Marcondes Ferraz was still managing the operations. Once again, the same Angolan lawyer was used – accompanied by a colleague, both with @Trafigura.com email addresses – representing the company Angofret (BVI) Ltd., referred to as an “external investor”.

When she was contacted, the Angolan lawyer said that she no longer worked for Trafigura. She did not wish to discuss her family ties with General Kopelipa or her activities related to Vecturis, the company which officially owned a 1% stake in the LAR consortium and was responsible for operating trains along the Lobito Corridor, an activity for which it would receive a fee (the amount has not been disclosed).

On 20th June 2012, Trafigura’s lawyer registered the company Vecturis Logística, Portos e Caminhos de Ferro, Ltda. The Angolan subsidiary of the Belgian group was then described as a company belonging to DTS Serviços Ltda and DTS Imobiliária Ltda, meaning part of DT Group. In 2015, it was based in the Torre Caravela building, alongside all the companies in the joint venture set up by General Dino and Trafigura, including a certain Angofret Ltda. 

Paradoxically, Vecturis is nowhere to be found nowadays in Luanda. During our visit to the Torre Caravela, the receptionist seemed very embarrassed whenever any DT Group company was mentioned, despite the huge sign that is still displayed on the front of the building. He referred us to the “Torre X”, Trafigura’s new address. 

Was Vecturis an independent company? Whatever the case, it was a strange choice of partner for the LAR consortium. In Belgium, the company has only four employees and a turnover closer to that of a small NGO than of a rail operator, “providing transport services worldwide for passengers, mining products and commercial cargo”. 

When questioned, its co-founder, Eric Peiffer, said that Vecturis’ turnover was essentially made up of invoices issued for services or consultancy. “Incidentally, it is also because we are in a market with a high country risk that we have always sought to keep the size of our headquarters to a minimum”. On the other hand, he said that he knew nothing about the Angolan company called Vecturis Ltda, created by Trafigura's lawyer: “I was not involved in setting up this company, which was undoubtedly established at the time when Trafigura was planning to take a stake in Vecturis”, when the two companies were already trying to obtain the concession for the Lobito Corridor, just before the death of Claude Dauphin in 2015... and the fall of President Dos Santos in 2017.

In its reply to Public Eye, Trafigura points out that it was awarded the concession for the Lobito Corridor through “a transparent public tender process run by Angola’s Commission of Evaluation, with McKinsey acting as a technical advisor”. The trading house also said that it had no “corporate links” with Vecturis and that General Dino had not been one of its shareholders or a shareholder of any of its subsidiaries since December 2021. It added that General Kopelipa was not a shareholder in “any of the legal entities in the Trafigura Group”.

Before the arrest of Mariano Marcondes Ferraz, Trafigura seemed fairly comfortable with these initial investments along the Corridor, as it mentioned them in its annual reports from 2013 to 2015. It was the Brazilian businessman, complete with a portrait photo, who highlighted the potential of the port of Lobito, located directly west of the Central African Copperbelt, saying that “it works closely with international and local partners”, and the investments in “Angola’s future”. And the rest is history. 

After travelling for almost 24 hours, the Caminho de Ferro de Benguela train enters the province of Moxico and its tropical forest. This former stronghold of UNITA, an anti-communist party opposed to the MPLA during the Angolan civil war, was one of the most heavily land-mined regions in the country. Along the Corridor’s rail tracks, the UK-US NGO Halo Trust removed nearly 2,000 anti-personnel mines between 1997 and 2010 to facilitate the renovation of the line, but an area of 10 million square metres still needs to be cleared along the tracks, according to this organization. 

Other types of dangers are now lurking in the region. On 15th August this year, a consortium train was derailed 127 kilometres from the provincial capital Luena, with tons of sulphur on board. This information provided by the Angolan press agency has hardly been reported or investigated. The accident, which involved no casualties, disrupted rail traffic for at least a day. In this remote region, the issue of the potential environmental consequences has not been addressed or commented on by the media. At Public Eye’s request, Trafigura forwarded a letter from LAR, dated 7th October 2024, to the Angolan Ministry of Environment. The consortium mentioned a wagon transporting “32 bags containing 1 (one) ton of sulphur”, which were not damaged by the accident over 400 metres of track, “in an area already damaged following the previous derailment of a passenger train”.

This accident also highlights the downside of the Lobito Corridor. In one direction, LAR’s wagons carry copper and cobalt, still only in small quantities given the capacity of the network. In the other, sulphur and fuel are transported to the Congolese mines of Kolwezi, which are most often operated by electric generators that are now powered by Trafigura’s storage centres (Impala Terminals). This is sufficient reason to fear an environmental disaster, given the dilapidated state of the railway infrastructure.

But Trafigura sees its return to Angola as a win-win situation on all fronts. In addition to obtaining the 2022 railway concession, the trading house once again won the contract to supply gasoil to Angolan service stations in February 2023.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is disappointed. “Trafigura’s return to Angola is a testament to the elites’ lack of imagination in terms of economic policy, while highlighting the fact that the anti-corruption reforms have turned out to be purely cosmetic. Trafigura has been able not only to safeguard its Angolan stronghold, but also to gain respectability,” he says.

Despite the change of regime in September 2017, Angola is still one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It languishes in 121st place (out of 180) in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Worse still, the decline in oil revenues in 2015 has led to a major slowdown in the country’s social development. Consumer goods are largely imported and have become even more expensive, while the unemployment rate has reached unsustainable levels in urban centres and among young people (42% and 58% respectively). More than one third of Angola’s 38 million inhabitants live on less than $2.15 a day, according to data from the World Bank. 

“People associate Lourenço with the end of growth,” maintains Filipe Calvão, an associate professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a specialist in sub-Saharan extractive economies. “Angolans have the impression that the new regime has pushed aside the Dos Santos family and replaced them with its relatives, just like a game of musical chairs. There is a wave of nostalgia; people miss their ‘Princess’ Isabel.” The shadow of the daughter of former president José Eduardo Dos Santos often looms large in discussions over coffee in Luanda. This hardly comes as any surprise, given the current economic situation, reflected by the dilapidated state of a large area of the historic city centre. In the Luanda region, there is a proverb in Kimbundu (a Bantu language) which says: “Either there is morality or everyone eats”.

But in this endless game of Angolan musical chairs, the companies in the consortium seem confident that they can hold onto their throne. Like Trafigura, its Portuguese partner Mota-Engil also rubbed shoulders with those close to the regime. Its Angolan subsidiary counted Sonangol Holdings (20%) among its shareholders – between May 2014 and September 2022. It was its director Manuel Vicente, Angola’s “Mr. Oil”, who had supported the diversification strategy of the Angolan public oil company. Sonangol sold its shares in the subsidiary two months after the concession was awarded to the LAR consortium. Other shareholders of Mota-Engil included Angolan banks Finicapital (15%) and Banco Millennium Atlântico (5%), according to Angolan media outlet O Telegrama, both owned by Carlos Silva. This Portuguese-Angolan businessman is a close associate of Manuel Vicente, having financed a corrupt plan aimed at shelving criminal proceedings against the senior official in Portugal. The corrupt prosecutor received a prison sentence, but Manuel Vicente and Carlos Silva are continuing to do business in Angola.

Professor Heitor Carvalho highlights this apparent paradox. “Trials abroad have no bearing in Angola. Corrupt businessmen are sentenced in other countries, but here they get on with their daily lives.” 

At the Luau terminus, it’s the same story every Thursday. The Caminho de Ferro train has only two third-class carriages and, as the weekend approaches, travellers run the risk of being stranded in this dull border town between Angola and the DRC. So, as the train arrives at the station, the tension is already palpable, when driving rain suddenly falls on the platform. The perfect storm.

Amid screams, those who were waiting in the queue for hours are pushed back by the police, allowing a handful of VIPs to come through. Most people will make the seven-hour journey to Luena standing up, crammed into a roasting hot carriage. The police do not allow us to document these events. “They don’t want you to show what the situation is like,” quickly remarks a railway company employee.

In the air of excitement inside the carriage, after booing the presence of foreigners who “take seats from Angolans”, a young mother of two children sings a song about the struggle for Angola’s independence, Velha Chica. Old Chica, the grandmother of the people who washed the clothes of important people, continually passes on this message to future generations: “Xé menino, não fala política” [Hey boy, don’t talk politics].