Staff Reporter
A MID-LEVEL Angolan military officer who owns fifteen vehicles, 45 properties in Luanda, five apartments in Portugal, and one luxurious house in Namibia, was arrested recently while trying to leave the country carrying a huge amount of cash.
According to Angolan media, Major Pedro Lussaty was arrested at the airport while trying to leave the country carrying two suitcases full of money.
The subsequent police search of his many residences uncovered safes and additional suitcases full of money for a grand total of 10 million US dollars, four million Euros, and 800 million Angolan Kwanzas.
It is alleged that Major Lussaty, who is attached to the presidency’s powerful Security Department, was under surveillance for some time following a suspicious property transaction in Spain where he allegedly sold a house to another Angolan military officer, General Bento Kangamba.
The Spanish police alerted their Angolan counterparts, and they promptly took up the matter and eventually caught Lussaty with his pants down.
Social media commentators opined that the fairly junior Lussaty is either being used as a scapegoat or a proxy for senior officials.
A few days after Lussaty’s arrest, the Angolan President, João Lourenço, dismissed six military generals attached to the same Security Department in the presidency.
The President did not provide reasons.
Since coming to power in 2017, President Lourenço has been on an unprecedented anti-corruption crusade targeting mostly his predecessor Jose Eduardo dos Santos and his associates.
But the looting continues.
Angola is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
The 2020 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index gave Angola a score of 27, ranking Angola 142nd out of 180 countries, a slight improvement from 2019 when the country scored 26 and was ranked 146th.
