Isabel dos Santos, the billionaire daughter of the former president of Angola, claims to be a self-made businesswoman, but a cache of documents investigated by the Guardian and partners appears to tell a different story.

The Luanda Leaks are a trove of 715,000 emails, charts, contracts, audits, and accounts that help explain how Dos Santos built a business empire worth an estimated $2bn.

Dos Santos has made her name, and fortune, through key roles and investments in some of Angola’s most important industries. She holds stakes in oil, telecoms and banking, was head of the state’s oil business, and was behind lucrative plans, since scrapped, to redevelop a vast area of Angola’s capital, Luanda.

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The documents offer details of how those holdings came about, including presidential decrees from which she benefited, and the formation of a network of offshore companies. They suggest that while western banks were often unwilling to support businesses in which she and her husband, the art collector Sindika Dokolo, had invested, the state of Angola, and her own banks, were there to advance the cash.

Much of the couple’s money appears to have been reinvested in their businesses, but the data also gives an insight into their spending on luxury real estate, including homes in Monaco and Dubai. The files were initially obtained by the anti-corruption charity Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Dos Santos has denied that she benefited unfairly from her father’s position, and said moves by the Angolan government to freeze her and her husband’s assets were a political “witch-hunt”. The couple strenuously deny wrongdoing of any kind. Dos Santos told the BBC. “I can say my holdings are commercial, there are no proceeds from contracts or public contracts or money that has been deviated from other funds.”