Orlando Veloso
President, Electrical Engineer, and Real Estate Development in Potugal/Angola
Orlando Veloso is the President of Riverstone Oaks Corporation. Additionally, he is President of Sigma Group and Sigma Imobiliária. These companies provide construction, development, and maintenance services to a number of clients, primarily within Angola.
Orlando earned an electrical engineering degree in 1985. He has received multiple global certifications in trailblazing power distribution technologies from programs in Angola, Portugal, Sweden and Finland.
Following graduation and training, Orlando worked on several major electrical engineering projects for the Ministry of Energy in Angola. While at the Ministry of Energy, Orlando worked jointly with the World Bank and the African Development Bank preparing comprehensive studies needed to finance plans for the electrification of rural locations within Angola.
Orlando spent a significant portion of his career in differing capacities at Sonangol, the Angolan state-owned oil company. From 1994 to 2010, he was Head of Engineering for Civil Works at Sonangol. From 2002 to 2010, Orlando worked as President of Technip Angola, an engineering joint venture between Technip France and Sonangol.
Orlando then moved into roles at SONIP, the real estate division of Sonangol. SONIP is responsible for the management of Sonangol’s real estate, with an emphasis on administrative buildings and hotel units. There he also managed the housing policy for Sonangol’s employees.
Orlando was the Head of the Design and Supervision Team at SONIP between 2010 and 2013, before serving as President of SONIP between 2013 and 2016. The scale of SONIP’s operations was grandiose—for example, in 2014, during Orlando’s tenure as President, it was estimated that SONIP was constructing 35,000 homes in Angola. These efforts improved the lives of thousands of Angolan families by providing them with better housing conditions.
As a result of his experience managing a number of extremely large and complex real estate projects for SONIP, Orlando has since taken these skills and experiences into the private sector, where his companies operate broadly within the real estate industry. His companies have experienced significant success, as they are some of the few corporations in Angola with the capability of carrying out complex construction projects.