In May 2011, Sudanese media reported on a commotion that had broken
out in the Sudatel hall when a debate erupted amongst the
shareholders of Sudatel Telecom Group, Ltd., which is the largest
public telecommunications company in Sudan. The 2010 financial
reports showed that Expresso, the holding company of Sudatel
investments abroad, had sold 30% of its shares in Nigeria to the
private Larrycom company, At the time, Larry Com was owned
anonymously.
According to a report published by one of the shareholders, the
transfer of the company’s ownership shot Sudatel’s deficit up to
$189 million dollars, and the shareholders cornered the members of
the company’s board of directors and demanded to know, “Who owns
Larrycom?”
Sudanese newspapers circulated the news and described the incident as “the corruption of the century.”
This investigation is based on leaked documents obtained by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (
) and shared with ARIJ and a large number of publishers around the
world within a project labeled as the Pandora Papers. The leaks mark
the biggest cross-border journalistic collaboration project in
history and include millions of documents from lawyers’ offices
about tax havens. They also uncover assets, secret transactions, and
the hidden fortunes of the rich, including more than 130
billionaires, more than 30 world leaders, a number of fugitives or
convicted people alongside sports stars, judges, tax officials, and
counterintelligence agencies.
These documents uncover an alliance between former chairman of the
board of directors of Sudatel, Abdel-Aziz Osman, and Abdel-Basit
Hamzah, the businessman who is close to the former president of
Sudan, Omar Al-Bashir. Together they transferred shares from the
Sudatel public company to the privately owned Sudanese Larrycom
company through Expresso Holding. They also partnered in
establishing another company under the name of Larrycom in the
British Virgin Islands directly before signing the deals, which
counts as a conflict of interest.
Hamzah and Al-Bashir’s friendship goes back to when the former was a
member of the Islamic Movement through which the National Congress
Party that ruled in Sudan emerged. Abdel-Aziz Osman was a leading
member of the same party.
After the revolution that toppled the Sudanese president Omar
Al-Bashir in 2019, the Committee to Eliminate Empowerment, Fight
Corruption and Recover Sudanese Funds issued decision No. (134/ 04)
in April 2020 to freeze the assets and bank accounts of sixteen
companies and figures, which are all owned by the businessman
Abdel-Basit Hamzah or run by him. These included the Zawaya Company,
which was founded in 2002 and the companies it owns: Larrycom for
Limited Investments, also founded in 2002، and Ram Energy Company,
Ltd., founded in 2003.
In a press conference held in April 2020, the committee stated that
Abdel-Basit Hamzah “started as a small officer in the armed forces
and belongs to the Islamic Movement. In 1985, he joined the Special
Work System in the military and gained access to sensitive files
through his work. He was able to control more than two billion
dollars and was transformed into a business tycoon overnight. He ran
the department of Special Operations and worked in many other
facilities run by the regular forces. He came upon the
telecommunications sector, which is an extremely rich sector.”
Hamzah’s relationship with the telecommunications sector started in
2002 when his newly established company Larrycom obtained the
license to run the second telecommunications company, which later
transformed to MTN. Larrycom held 15% of MTN Sudan’s shares while
the company itself owned the rest.
Hamzah was the chairman of the board of directors of Sudan’s
publicly owned company, Sudatel and worked alongside Abdel-Aziz
Osman who is an Islamist and a member of the National Congress Party
that had ruled previously. Under their management, the sister
company of Sudatel, the Mobitel public company, was sold for $1.3
billion. According to the Committee to Eliminate Empowerment, Fight
Corruption and Recover Sudanese Funds, Mobitel was sold to a foreign
company, namely the Kuwaiti Zain company, for 10% of its original
value. Due to this acquisition, the foreign company made $5 million
a day in profit. The committee notes that the funds from the
transaction were used in external investments in West Africa.
Expresso was founded in the United Arab Emirates in November 2007
with a capital of $50.000.00, and Sudatel owns 75% of its shares. A
Dubai International Financial Center report shows that Larrycom is
Sudatel’s only partner in Expresso. The company’s registration
papers reveal that until September 16, 2012, Abdel-Basit Hamzah was
one of the directors of the company that was founded in the
Emirates.
According to the 2010 Sudatel report, the purpose of establishing
Expresso was “to run the group’s global operations,” which were
focused on West Africa.
Two months after the establishment of Expresso, the leader of the
National Congress Party in Sudan, Abdel-Aziz Osman, became chairman
of the board of directors of Sudatel. According to the leaked
documents, in February 2008 and one month after he assumed this
position, Expresso filed an application at the Panamanian legal
office Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee to register the company in the
British Virgin Islands under the same name of Larrycom, Ltd. for
Investments. This company’s 50,000 shares were divided between
Hamzah and Osman.
At the same time, a network of companies owned by Sudatel directly
or indirectly was established in the British Virgin Islands. These
were run by the directors of Sudatel and Expresso: Khalid Hisham,
Tariq Hamzah Zain Al-Abedin and Tariq Hamzah Rahmat Allah. Larrycom
was the only company in the network that was owned by people instead
of companies.
Two years before this point, the American Department of the Treasury
had issued decision No. 1340 0E to place the following companies on
the list of sanctions in 2006 for “their contribution to the
conflict in the Darfur region”: the Sudatel public company; Ram,
which is owned by Larrycom, which, in turn, is owned by Zawaya.
When Osman became the chairman of the board of directors of Sudatel
in 2008, the group bought an additional 50% in shares in the public
company of Intercellular Nigeria, Ltd. in early 2009. In this way,
the Nigerian company was owned by Sudatel by 70% through a $60
million dollar deal, as Sudatel’s 2009 financial report shows.
However, by the end of the year on December 31, 2009, Expresso, the
company that runs Sudatel’s assets abroad, sold 17.5% of Sudatel’s
shares in the Nigerian company to the Sudanese Larrycom. This sale
reduced Sudatel’s share to around 52.5%.
On January 7, 2010, Expresso sold 30% of Sudatel’s share in the
company to Larrycom for $25.71 million with a profit of $6.063
million, as reported in the company’s 2010 financial report. By
this, Sudatel’s share in Intercellular Nigeria was downsized to only
30%.
This transaction enraged Sudatel’s shareholders. On May 18, 2011,
former shareholder in the company, Amin Sayid Ahmad, published a
letter that was circulated by the Sudanese Al-Ahdath Newspaper. Amin
explains that Sudatel’s general deficit on the company’s financial
statements reached $189 million more than in 2009. This means that
in 2009 and 2010, there was a $264 million reduction in the
shareholders’ funds.
Amin’s letter mentions that Osman signed the company’s financial
reports. Amin is a banker and a financial expert, and he considers
signing the financial reports as part of the responsibility of the
executive management and not the board of directors. Item (2) of
Article (265) of 1925 states, “The general manager is also the
primary executive authority before the board and takes charge of the
company’s financial, administrative and technical activities based
on the company’s registration contract and the board’s directives.”
Amin pointed out that Ernst & Young’s independent auditors in
Bahrain who had previously audited the group’s financial statements
in 2009 did not do so in 2010.
Amin noticed the recurrence of the name of Larrycom in a number of
follow-up clarifications to the financial reports of sales
operations in the shares of the companies affiliated with the
Sudatel Group. He also noticed other transactions for millions of
dollars and asked, “Which company evaluated the assets sold to
Larrycom? Who owns Larrycom? What is the capital paid to this
company? Is it true that one of the owners is also a partner in the
Zawaya Group whose shares are held by Sudatel’s chairman of the
board of directors?”
In a statement to ARIJ, Amin says that the ultimate beneficiary of
the sales of the Sudatel shares to Larrycom is the Zawaya company.
This company was founded by a group that is close to former
president Omar Al-Bashir and includes people like Abdel-Basit Hamzah
and Abdel-Aziz Osman.
Apart from an unknown and unverified LinkedIn account showing the
name of “Osman” as the director of Zawaya, we did not obtain any
information indicating that Osman was one of the Zawaya
shareholders. The older Zawaya website clearly mentions that Hamzah
had previously managed the company.
The Committee to Eliminate Empowerment, Fight Corruption and Recover
Sudanese Funds sees that the transactions among Sudatel, Expresso,
Larrycom, and Al-Bashir are all connected. In a statement, the
committee said, “Expresso used to control all these funds, and very
little of it returned to Sudan. They were invested outside the
country on behalf of Abdel-Basit Hamzah and others along with the
family of the ousted president Omar Al-Bashir.”
Regarding the transactions conducted when Abdel-Aziz Osman ran the
company, Amin tells ARIJ that as a public company, the chairman of
the board of directors of Sudatel should have run the transactions
by the General Assembly before sealing the deals, and this did not
happen.
Sudatel’s financial reports classify the company as a public company
as per the Law on public Corporations of 1925. Article (2-262) (B)
of this law on public companies states that the board of directors
in these companies should sign contracts and agreements on behalf of
the public sector company.
Jackson Oldfield is the founding partner in the German institution
of Civil Forum for Asset Recovery. He tells ARIJ that Larrycom is
owned by Abdel-Basit Hamzah who partnered with the chairman of
Sudatel, Abdel-Aziz Osman, and this makes the transactions between
Sudatel and Larrycom “seem like a conflict of interest.”
Hamzah is now serving a ten-year sentence and was indicted for
illegal profiteering and for violating the anti-money laundering and
anti-terrorism law. In the meantime, the Committee to Eliminate
Empowerment is still trying to track his offshore investments of
which “very little has returned to Sudan.”
