The son of former president José Eduardo dos Santos has been freed from the five-year prison sentence handed down by Angola's Supreme Court.

The five-year prison sentence handed down to José Filomeno dos Santos by the Angolan Supreme Court in 2020 in the case of the 500 million dollars illegally transferred by the National Bank of Angola (BNA) to a bank in London has been deemed null and void by the Angolan Constitutional Court.

The transfer of 500 million dollars that led to his conviction was authorized by José Eduardo dos Santos' son in 2017, when he was still President of the Republic and when Filomeno dos Santos was in charge of the Angolan Sovereign Fund, to which he had been appointed by his father in 2012.

In a ruling signed this Wednesday (03), the plenary of 10 Constitutional judges ruled in favor of the extraordinary appeal presented by the defenses of José Filomeno dos Santos and the other three convicted defendants, concluding that the "constitutional principles of legality, adversarial proceedings, a fair and proper trial and the right to a defense" were violated and, therefore, the case should "be remanded to the appropriate court".

According to a source in the Angolan Attorney General's Office, quoted by the Portuguese newspaper "ExpressThe Supreme Court will now have to determine whether it will hold a new trial or instead return the case to the Public Prosecutor's Office. In those circumstances, this will most likely mean the end of the court case.

In addition to José Filomeno dos Santos, Valter Filipe, governor of the National Bank of Angola at the time of the events, Jorge Gaudens Pontes Sebastião, a businessman and childhood friend of the former president's son, and António Samália Bule, director of the BNA, were sentenced to prison.

Zenu, as Filomeno dos Santos is known, was charged by the Public Prosecutor's Office in September 2018 with crimes of fraud, money laundering, influence peddling, forgery and criminal association, and was arrested at the time. The former president's son spent six months in pre-trial detention.