[2] It was a partnership between several former Angolan military leaders; Joaquim Duarte da Costa David, former director of Sonangol; and Gray Security Services Ltd, a South African security firm with connections to the mercenary company Executive Outcomes, which operated in Angola until December 31, 1998, when South African citizens were banned from participating in foreign conflicts.

[10] In 2011, Angolan journalist and anti-corruption activist Rafael Marques published Diamantes de Sangue: Corrupção e Tortura em Angola (Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola), an exposé alleging severe human rights violations by personnel of Teleservice, the FAA, and other private security companies protecting the operations of the diamond mining companies in the provinces of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul.

The exposé included more than five hundred reports of massacres, murders, rapes, mutilations, extortion, corpse desecration, organ removal, beatings, torture, slavery, and similar abuses.

[14] In 2015, following Marques's receipt of an international journalism award, the generals pressed twenty-four charges of defamation against him in Angola, with a potential prison time of nine years and a fine in excess of $1,200,000.

[16][17][18] After an open statement by over 30 jewelers and press freedom and human rights NGOs in support of Marques, the charges against him were dropped under the provision that Diamantes de Sangue was not to be reprinted.