"The government can't rebuild all at once everything that was destroyed during so many years of war," Prime Minister Fernando da Piedade Dias dos Santos, who is not related to the president, told the local press last year.
But others say Angola's development has been crippled by the disappearance of vast sums of money.
About $4.2 billion -- more than the $3.6 billion the government spent on social programs -- disappeared from the Angolan treasury from 1997 through 2002, according to a report this year from Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nonprofit.
The figures were taken from two International Monetary Fund reports on Angola, including one that the Dos Santos government barred the IMF from releasing, but which was obtained by Human Rights Watch. The fund is a quasi-governmental organization, made up of 184 member countries, that lends money to developing nations and monitors their finances.
In the leaked report, the IMF said Angola filtered its oil revenue through "a web of opaque offshore accounts." There has been a series of allegations that Dos Santos -- who is paid the equivalent of about $2,000 a month as president -- and other Angolan officials have stashed government funds and bribes in foreign banks.
* A Swiss judge in 2002 froze millions of dollars in bank accounts that allegedly were used by a foreign businessman to pay off Angolan officials. The Dos Santos government denied the allegation and filed a formal protest, but most of the accounts remained blocked.
Related investigations by Swiss and French authorities uncovered two private accounts held by Dos Santos in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, according to banking and court documents shown to The Times by London-based Global Witness, which campaigns for greater transparency in the oil industry. Global Witness released a report two months ago that alleged that Dos Santos' offshore accounts held tens of millions of dollars, including funds diverted from the state treasury.
* The U.S. Embassy in Luanda in 2002 looked into an attempt by Aguinaldo Jaime, then head of Angola's central bank and now deputy prime minister, to transfer $50 million in Angolan oil revenue from a Citibank account in London to a private account at a Bank of America branch in San Diego, The Times has learned from three people familiar with the transaction. The Bank of America account had been opened several weeks earlier by a West African businessman who knew Jaime, the sources said.
