Bandeira, who would use the diplomatic advantages of his brother, and Karel Marang, who held a diplomatic passport issued by Liberia. Reis then proceeded to launder the bills into gold-backed foreign currencies and smaller denominations of Portuguese currency. Reis himself received 25% of the proceeds of his scheme, which made him very wealthy. Maintaining always the internal fiction that they were acting for the government, he reminded his partners of their moral obligations to Angola. Together they created the "Bank of Angola & Metropole" in June 1925, with Bandeira at the helm, both to aid in circulation of their bills and to invest in projects in both Portugal and Angola. By illegally increasing the monetary base and investing heavily in currency, land, building, and businesses, he and Bandeira created a boom in the Portuguese economy. Reis bought the Palace of the Golden Boy (Palácio do Menino de Ouro, nowadays the building of the British Council in Lisbon), three farms, a taxi fleet, and spent an enormous quantity of money on jewellery and expensive clothing for his wife. José Bandeira bought retail shops and invested in all manner of enterprise; he also sought, unsuccessfully, to purchase the newspaper Diário de Notícias. In the fall of 1925 Reis and Hennies made a tour of Angola, buying properties, investing in corporations, and making development plans. He was hailed there as a savior and as "Portugal's own Cecil Rhodes". The final phase of Reis' scheme was to buy controlling interest in the Bank of Portugal, a step which would allow him to retroactively make his fiction about Bank approval true. With control of the bank, the entire counterfeiting could be swept under the rug, ensuring that there would never be any evidence of the fraud. During the summer and fall of 1925, while he and Hennies toured Angola, he had Bandeira and his own assistant Francisco Ferreira, Jr. ferreting out the ownership of the Bank shares (it was secret) and buying them under the complicated rules that the Bank's charter allowed. Eventually they controlled 10,000 of the 45,000 shares needed for controlling interest in the bank, but publicity led Bandeira to ease off the purchases even as he sent Reis ever more inflated false reports of the number of shares they had acquired. Discovery and arrest Throughout 1925 rumours of fake banknotes arose, but they could not be detected: the notes Reis had released