Trail of Destruction

The chartered plane with a Brazilian first division football team that crashed near Medellin killing 71 people was the property of Venezuelan businessman and former politician Ricardo Albacete Vidal.
But the sponsor and first investor in his LaMia airline company is the renowned Sam Pa.
Sam Pa, the controversial businessman.
sampaSam Pa, according to the Financial Times, controls a ‘secretive Hong Kong-based business network at the heart of China’s advance into Africa.’ He was detained last year in Beijing on suspicion of corruption.
There are thousands of reports and news items about Sam Pa’s activities – and all of them link him to Macau.
In 2004, Sam Pa and his associates arrived in Venezuela to explore the opportunities presented by oil. A few months later, Pa and his partner Lo Fung Hung were guests on ‘Alo Presidente,’ a TV programme hosted by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Chavez presented Lo as the “daughter of a Chinese general, someone who comes from a family with a military tradition and who is now the manager of a global company.”
In truth, Lo is married to Wang Xiangfei, manager of several China Fund International-linked companies. China Fund International is one of the most important of Sam Pa’s enterprises.
Seven years after the Chavez meeting, Ricardo Albacete Vidal said in a television interview that the LaMia airplane operation was only possible because of the financial support of Sam Pa.

North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe
U.S. researcher JR Mailey describes Sam Pa’s activities as “the prototypical predatory investor” and produced a much cited report in which he describes how Pa does business: “Having allegedly bribed African government officials and engaged in illicit arms trafficking and diamond smuggling, Queensway’s [the foremost holding, in Hong Kong] deals in Africa have often had a disastrous impact on governance. (…) Promised high-profile infrastructure construction projects regularly fail to materialise. Allegations of corruption among senior government officials who control natural resource contracts are widespread. Reputable extractive firms are cut out of the market, undermining the long-term health of the resource sector. And unaccountable governments are able to persist, propped up by the infusion of financial and material support to the regimes in power.”
Scouting for local business, Sam Pa helped North Korea and its secretive KKG obtain foreign currency for the Pyongyang regime. But he was discovered and North Korean activities subsequently blocked.
Another destination chosen by Sam Pa was Zimbabwe. But again, things went wrong: The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Pa, a well known supporter of the Mugabe regime, in 2014, saying: ‘Sam Pa is being designated for undermining democratic processes and institutions in Zimbabwe, facilitating public corruption by Zimbabwean senior officials through illicit diamond deals, and providing financial and logistical support to the Government of Zimbabwe.’

Guangxi in Macau
He needed new markets and new perspectives for his deals and according to several sources found what he needed in Macau.
It is not clear who his contacts are or who introduced him to Helder Bataglia, but it seems it was this Portuguese-Angolan businessman, founder and president of the Portuguese Escom Group, who opened the doors to Angola and Venezuela.
No direct connections from Bataglia to Macau are known, but this is just one of the many hazy points in the course of these two entrepreneurs. Sam and Bataglia will be doing business together, especially in Angola, involving the Sonangol oil company.
The Chinese Caixin magazine wrote a story on Sam Pa saying: ‘The acquired fields in Angola since 2008 have become black holes for Sinopec, with the company continuing to invest without generating any commercial returns.’
Sam Pa is an Angolan citizen, with tied connections to Eduardo dos Santos, president and creator of China Sonangol International Holdings, based in Hong Kong. Angolan vice-president Domingos Vicente is reportedly an associate.

Arrested
The mysterious Chinese investment tycoon was arrested in October, 2015 in Beijing.
Several sources said his arrest was linked to a major corruption enquiry involving China’s state-owned oil company Sinopec. But since the notice of his arrest nothing more has been heard. Is he languishing in prison? Charged with what?
At the same time as his arrest, Su Shulin, the Governor of Fujian Province, and former boss of China’s state-owned oil giant Sinopec, was “accused of helping a relative to secure contracts to build a massive oil depot in China. (…) Among the deals investigators are reportedly examining is a huge deal which saw Mr. Pa act as a middleman or fixer to secure Sinopec a lucrative slice of Angola’s oilfields” (quoted from an investigative news report from The Independent). Coincidental or not, these cases were revealed as part of the anti-corruption campaign launched by President Xi Jinping.
“Pa’s story captivated journalists and investigators the world over. He went from being a bankrupt arms dealer in the late 1990s to commanding a multi-billion dollar corporate empire in under a decade,” says U.S. researcher JR Mailey.


The AKA Man
When the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Sam Pa it also revealed some of his other names: in addition to the usual Sam Pa, he is known as Samo Hui, Xu Jinghua, Sam King, Tsui Kyung-wha, Ghiu Ka Leung [used in the first Hong Kong business] and Antonio Famtosonghiu Sampo Menezes, his Angolan moniker.
Pa was born in February, 1958 of Chinese nationality, but also holds a British passport as well as his Angolan document.


Just one airplane
LaMia Venezuela is the owner of the British Aerospace 146 short-haul plane, operated by another company called LaMia Bolivia, a charter airline with one single plane. The other two are not functioning.
Albacete founded the airline in Venezuela around 2010 but his company was never granted a licence to fly, according to Venezuela’s Civil Aviation Authority, quoted by the international press. That’s why Albacete later rented out the three planes to LAMIA Bolivia, a separate corporate entity.
The same British-made aircraft transported Argentina’s national squad for a match earlier this month in Brazil.