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Angola’s Tax Authority (AGT) has awarded Portuguese academic Carla Trindade two consultancy contracts worth a combined 551 million kwanzas to help investigate tax offences. Yet documents reviewed by Maka Angola point to irregularities in dealings between her husband’s company and the same authority. She and her husband are also named in a criminal complaint formally lodged with prosecutors alleging money laundering, tax evasion and other offences.
Trindade teaches tax law, tax litigation and arbitration at the Portuguese Catholic University’s Lisbon School of Law, where she coordinates the postgraduate programme in tax litigation and a short course on crime and taxation. She also teaches economic and business law at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, and taxation on the master’s programme in business law at the Catholic University of Angola.
She is entitled to the presumption of innocence. The central question is why the AGT hired her to help investigate tax offences when her own dealings with the authority demand scrutiny.
On 2–3 September 2026, Trindade led a seminar in Luanda on tax fraud, money laundering and corruption, organised under the auspices of the AGT and the prosecutor general’s office (PGR). Participants included senior tax and prosecution officials, representatives of the judicial council, intelligence agencies, the Criminal Investigation Service (SIC) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF).
Opening the event, Prosecutor General Pedro Mendes de Carvalho warned that financial crime often relies on “complex structures and mechanisms designed to obstruct the discovery of the truth”. His office has largely ignored the complaint filed against Trindade and her husband, Mário Martins, on 17 October 2024. Once again, the prosecutor general’s rhetoric bears little relation to his office’s conduct.
Maka Angola sent Trindade 58 specific questions. Her general response denied any direct relationship with In Pressionante Kianda and stated that she had obtained Angolan nationality through her father. Correspondence and records voluntarily supplied by participants in the events and conversations challenge her account of her business activities.
Contracts and confidential tax information
Trindade and José Leiria, then chairman of the AGT, signed the first contract on 25 November 2024: 181 million kwanzas for six months of consultancy on tax-crime investigations. On 22 June 2026, they signed a second, worth 370 million kwanzas plus VAT for twelve months, following a restricted tender with prequalification.
The second contract allows annual renewals up to a maximum of 48 months. Its financial schedule, however, allocates the 370 million kwanzas to the first year, while another clause caps renewals at the contract value.
Her duties extend beyond occasional legal opinions. They include developing investigative strategies, reviewing reports and assisting with pre-trial investigative steps. The AGT undertakes to provide the necessary information, premises and institutional support. Her submissions are deemed approved unless the authority responds within five working days.
The access clause likely breaches taxpayer confidentiality rules by allowing a private consultant access to legally protected information. It also compromises national sovereignty and the separation of powers by opening tax and investigative records reserved to the state to a foreign private contractor. The absence of safeguards covering suitability, conflicts of interest and secure access increases the risk to fundamental rights and institutional independence.
Who assessed these risks before granting a consultant identified in the contract as Portuguese, with an address in Portugal, access to sensitive information, including material potentially subject to prosecutorial oversight?
A manager without a formal title
In Pressionante Kianda was established on 7 June 2023, with Mário Martins holding 70 per cent of its capital. Its AGT communications contract and amendments total 3.15 billion kwanzas.
Separately, in 2023–24, the company secured 197 million kwanzas in AGT contracts to assemble and reassemble exhibition stands, plus 93 million from other bodies overseen by the Ministry of Finance: 290 million kwanzas in all.
Emails show Trindade managing company business directly with the AGT, other finance ministry bodies and Banco Caixa Angola, which held the account receiving state payments.
On 14 August 2023, AGT board member Nerethz Tati sent Trindade procurement documents for the Cidade dos Kandengues Tributários exhibition in two tax regions. These included specifications and an invitation to submit a technical and financial proposal signed by Kianda’s legal representative. Fellow board member Roberta Malaquias and communications director Bráulio Assis were copied in.
On 25 June 2024, the finance ministry’s information and communications technology service, SETIC-FP, also sent an invitation to submit a company proposal directly to Trindade. Her Portuguese telephone number was listed as Kianda’s contact.
At the time, she was neither a shareholder nor a formally appointed manager. João dos Santos, then the company’s Angolan shareholder and manager, says that until November 2024 he had never signed an employment or consultancy contract with her. She had nevertheless been registered with Angola’s social security institute as an adviser to meet the staffing requirement for the AGT communications contract.
Trindade received tender documents, discussed costs, prepared proposals and intervened in banking and administrative matters without a formal appointment, employment or services contract, or power of attorney. Social security registration did not itself give her authority to bind the company.
Rui Verde, Maka Angola’s legal analyst, explains that de facto managers exercise “powers of direction, administration and representation” without formal appointment. What matters, he says, is who actually negotiates, makes decisions and represents the company. This principle allows those running a business to be held responsible even without a registered appointment. Trindade’s conduct fits that definition.
Neither Tati nor Leiria answered Maka Angola’s questions. Leiria signed the exhibition contract. On 10 September 2026, President João Lourenço swore him in as secretary of state for tax affairs.
Invoices and transfers to Portugal
On 26 June 2024, Trindade sent Tati quantities and cost estimates for promotional items for the AGT’s Peça Factura (“Ask for an Invoice”) campaign, proposing a budget of roughly 500 million kwanzas.
On 18 July, Kianda issued invoice FT 2024A1/68 for 470.4 million kwanzas, including 160 million for strategic consultancy and 124 million for campaign development and part of the promotional merchandise.
“As the company’s shareholder and manager, I confirm that In Pressionante Kianda never provided strategic consultancy to the AGT, and I never hired Carla or anyone else to do so. Yet that money was transferred to Portugal,” dos Santos says.
On 11 June, Martins’s Portuguese company, In Pressionante Wood & Metal, had issued Kianda a €391,000 invoice for exhibition materials. Bearing the same reference, FT 2024A1/68, it contained no strategic consultancy services.
On 17 August, accountant Francisco Barros challenged pressure from Tânia Ermitão, finance director of Martins’s Portuguese companies, to seek a 31 million kwanza VAT refund. Import VAT documents, he explained, were in the AGT’s name and had not been endorsed over to Kianda. Payment receipts, final customs declarations and clearance documents were missing. He demanded greater transparency.
Three days later, Trindade pressed Banco Caixa Angola’s António Toledo to execute transfers totalling €492,000 to Portugal. They were pending because the import documentation was inadequate.
Dos Santos says the AGT handled customs clearance for Kianda’s containers. “I only received them. Only the AGT knows whether the goods were checked.” He says he never saw the clearance records needed to compare invoiced goods with what actually entered Angola.
On 21 August, Trindade told Tati and Assis about a trip to China to identify suppliers for the AGT’s tenth-anniversary celebrations and Peça Factura campaign. She concluded that Portugal remained the more practical option.
Formal appointment and personal payments
Documents recognising Trindade as a manager came later. On 14 November 2024, the Regedoria registry office in Viana recognised her in that capacity, according to a notarised record supplied by her lawyers. It gave her address as the Alvalade home of dos Santos’s family. He had meanwhile been removed as manager.
On 10 December, registrar A. David Txifutxi entered Trindade and Martins as managers at the Guichet Único de Empresas business registry.
In correspondence dated 3 October 2025, Leiria acknowledged that both had signed a 1.1 billion kwanza amendment to the communications contract on 28 July that year as company managers. Trindade’s dealings in 2023 and mid-2024 predated her formal appointment.
Between 27 and 29 October 2025, Kianda made 39 transfers totalling 38 million kwanzas to Trindade’s personal account at Banco Angolano de Investimentos. Maka Angola has examined the statements. What services or obligations justified these payments?
Inside the tender
On 31 October 2023, Trindade already held draft documents for the AGT’s 2024 communications tender, including the opening order, notice, specifications and correspondence for the national printing office. She circulated them among Kianda’s shareholders before the AGT chairman had signed them, writing: “I really think we can win this.”
Other messages suggest she knew in advance that Kianda and Isenta had qualified and a third bidder had been excluded. The official report recording that outcome is dated later.
On the day Assis signed the AGT’s response to an Isenta complaint, Trindade wrote: “I helped Bráulio draft the response” and “The argument about the missed deadline was mine.”
A person working for the beneficiary company was thus involved before publication, during evaluation and in preparing the authority’s response to a competitor.
Article 56(1)(e) of the Public Procurement Law bars bidders whose direct or indirect assistance in preparing tender documents could distort competition. In a legal opinion commissioned by Maka Angola, Verde concludes that “on these facts, the procedure is legally void”. He considers that invalidity may extend to the contract and its amendments. Trindade’s consultancy contracts in her own name are legally separate from the communications contract.
A complaint reaches its subject in five days
On 2 September 2024, the day the AGT approved the draft of Trindade’s first individual contract, Salvador Pascoal wrote to Inspector General of State Administration João Francisco, known as João Pinto. He raised suspicions about transfers and over-invoicing and sought action to stop transactions said to be pending and further awards to the couple.
The correspondence shows Pinto forwarding the message to Finance Minister Vera Daves, who sent it to Leiria. Leiria then passed it to Trindade: “Carla, good afternoon! Are you well? The finance minister sent me this message; she received it from the inspector general, Dr João Pinto.”
On 7 September, Trindade shared the complaint in Kianda Rescue, a WhatsApp group she had created: “So you understand how serious the situation is. I’ve just received this.”
Within five days, the complaint had travelled through the inspector general, finance minister and AGT chairman to one of its subjects. Leiria knew of the allegations at least 79 days before signing the 181 million kwanza contract.
The executive authorities had timely knowledge of the allegations and a duty to act: investigate, suspend affected decisions and prevent further contracts while doubts about the parties’ integrity remained unresolved. Proceeding with the award represented a serious failure to discharge that duty.
The correspondence does not show whether Leiria informed the AGT’s procurement unit or legal department, what inquiries preceded his forwarding of the complaint, or what response and assessment followed.
On 17 October 2024, Pascoal lodged a criminal complaint against the couple with the prosecutor’s office attached to the SIC, alleging money laundering, tax evasion, document forgery and other offences. The authorities must explain what happened to case 2416/024-B and its supporting documents.
A premature grey-list claim
The AGT presented September’s seminar as important to Angola’s work with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and its anti-money-laundering efforts.
Trindade had invoked the FATF in a different context on 29 April 2024. Asking Kianda’s Angolan shareholders to fund operations themselves, she wrote: “Money cannot leave here [Portugal] for there [Angola]. Angola is on the FATF grey list.”
Angola was added to the list on 25 October 2024, almost six months after her message. Her justification for not sending funds from Portugal preceded the decision she invoked.
Nationality and the registry trail
Trindade’s Angolan identity card, issued on 24 April 2024, gives dos Santos’s Alvalade address. Her 2026 AGT contract gives an address in Caxias, Portugal.
Dos Santos says she never lived at his home. “I let her use my address to obtain Angolan nationality, and she asked me to pay the registrar who expedited the process.”
Trindade says she obtained nationality through her father, José Maria Trindade. Álvaro Shaff, who provided public relations services to Kianda, says he accompanied her father to São Paulo parish to obtain the birth record used in the application.
According to Shaff, the SIAC registry in Kalauenda rejected the document as insufficient. Following contacts involving Ananay and her brother Jota, the application went to the Nova Marginal registry. After a month, it too said the record was insufficient.
“Finally, we went to the First Civil Registry in Kinaxixi, and its head said it was sufficient and immediately issued the identity card,” Shaff says. He adds that immigration officials later refused to issue the father’s passport without publication in the official gazette of the act authorising his acquisition of nationality.
In a legal opinion commissioned by Maka Angola, Verde argues that the father’s birth in Angola in 1951 was insufficient to justify recognition of nationality in 2023. The documents, he says, did not replace a lawful procedure for subsequently acquiring it. He therefore considers the recognition of the father’s nationality legally invalid, and consequently that of the daughter through him. His reasoning is set out in a separate opinion article [insert op-ed link].
Dual nationality is not itself unlawful. Article 32 of the Nationality Law, however, gives no domestic legal effect to an Angolan citizen’s other nationality. The law distinguishes nationality by origin, which cannot be withdrawn, from acquired nationality, which may be lost if obtained fraudulently or if its holder acts in Angola under another nationality.
Verde’s opinion challenges the validity of the registry decisions. The competent authorities must assess that question and explain how Trindade’s identity, status and residence declarations were checked.
Who answers for the checks?
The AGT must explain what checks it made before entrusting Trindade with work on taxpayers’ suspected offences, including her authority to act for Kianda, conflicts of interest and access to confidential information.
The UIF, PGR, SIC and state inspectorate must account for their handling of the complaints and coordination with procurement authorities. Daves, who also did not answer Maka Angola’s questions, must disclose what instructions accompanied her referral to Leiria and what response she received.
Were those named questioned? Were the documents examined? Was the case concluded, closed or referred for criminal investigation? Any unjustified failure to carry out legally required inquiries must entail accountability.
The tax authority cannot demand records, transparency and rigour from taxpayers while treating its own multimillion-kwanza contracts as arrangements between trusted acquaintances. Personal trust is no substitute for scrutiny of public money.
In the next instalment of this investigation, Maka Angola will examine Kianda’s finances and the Portuguese companies that invested 70,000 kwanzas— just over €100 at the time — and earned millions of euros within three years.
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