A sticky patch for Isabel dos Santos, Angola’s princess

ISABEL DOS SANTOS lives modestly these days. Or so the billionaire daughter of a former Angolan president, José Eduardo dos Santos, says. She arrived on foot to meet your correspondent at a smart hotel in London; and at the end of the interview she disappeared off towards a Tube station. It is a step down for a woman who once flew the rapper Nicki Minaj to Luanda, Angola’s capital, at a cost of millions. But these days Africa’s most prominent businesswoman has good reason to play it cool.On December 31st an Angolan court ordered that all of Ms dos Santos’s assets be frozen. They include her stakes in Unitel, Angola’s biggest mobile phone company, and Fomento de Angola, a bank, as well as myriad smaller enterprises such as a supermarket, a cinema and a mall. The seizure is not the only calamity to afflict the dos Santos clan of late. In December Isabel’s half-brother, José Filomeno, appeared in court over allegations that he transferred $500m out of Angola illegally. He claimed he could not afford a lawyer to defend himself. In October her half-sister, Welwitschia, was stripped of her parliamentary seat.