Alberto Mendes has been appointed to head “Sociedade de Gestão e Participações Financeiras S.A.R.L”, a holding company with a portfolio of 64 companies, which is the financial arm of the country’s ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
Prior to his new appointment, he was chairman of the board of Grupo Simples, which operates in the oil sector in Angola, the US, Mozambique, Ghana, Togo and Equatorial Guinea. He was also president of ‘Sociedade Kwanza – Gestão de Projectos Empresariais’, an entity that was responsible, among other things, for the implementation of the Angolan Activo Capital Venture Fund (Facra), which was earmarked for the micro, small and medium enterprise (Mpme) development program in the country.
Alberto Mendes was also, for a decade, the president of the Angolan Forum of Young Entrepreneurs (Fórum Angolano de Jovens Empreendedores), an organization that seeks to encourage and promote youth entrepreneurship in the country. He left his post in 2020.
A graduate in electrical engineering from the United States, the businessman is heading a holding company whose portfolio of activities includes 64 companies operating in the hotel, industrial, banking, fishing, media, construction and real estate sectors, etc. In 2019, the Angolan economic news website Valor reported that GEFI brings in around $5 million per month to the MPLA coffers.
Created in September 1992, according to the CLUB K Angola website, GEFI is the financial arm created by the MPLA, at a time when its leaders feared that Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA would win the first legislative elections in Angola. Its creation was always seen as a preventive measure in which, in the event of a victory for its political opponent, the MPLA would have economic power through some of the state-owned companies it privatised that year and transferred to its GEFI asset.
Financial participations in several companies
To date, GEFI holds 1% of SONANGOL, the Angolan public oil company. In the mining sector, explains the Angonoticias news website, GEFI’s influence extends to diamonds. In the hotel sector, it owns 20% of the Presidente Hotel and 51% of the Mayombe Hotel. It also has other stakes in hotels such as the Trópico, the Tivoli and the Hotel Terminus.
In addition, the site says, GEFI, whose CEO ‘deals directly with the party president’, also controls industrial units, such as Angola’s largest brewery, Cuca, in which it holds a 25% stake through Soba (Sociedade de Bebidas de Angola). Soba is a company of the French holding company Brasseries International (Bih), which belongs to the Castel group. The activities of the “commercial and financial arm” of the MPLA are also present in the banking sector.
In the Sol bank, for example, GEFI is the majority shareholder with 55%. In Banco Comercial Angolano (BCA), GEFI owns only 1.8%, while South African investors from the Absa group hold 50%.
In addition to construction and real estate, GEFI’s presence in the aviation sector is equally important. Through Planar, GEFI owns 51% of Fly 540. In the media sector, GEFI’s participation in the commercial radio stations of Cabinda (60%), 2000, Huila (75.50%), Morena de Benguela (80%) is the most important.
In Luanda Antena Comercial (LAC), GEFI has a 60% stake. In the marketing company Orion, GEFI holds 73%. GEFI’s holdings also extend to security with two companies: Socorro and Sambiente, as well as to other activities in the field of fishing with Epata Fishing and, in the field of consultancy, with Sansul.
