Part 1:The Looting Machine Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth ..A Curse of Riches ..Futungo, Inc.

The Looting Machine 

Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, 

Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth 

By Tom Burgis

introduction 

A Curse of Riches 

Opposite the New York Stock Exchange, at what the tourist information sign calls the “financial crossroads of the world,” the stately stone façade of 23 Wall Street evokes the might of the man whose bank it was built to house in 1913: J. P. Morgan, America’s capitalist titan. The exterior is popular with Hollywood—it doubled as the Gotham City stock exchange in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises—but when I visited in late 2013 the red carpet lay grubby and sodden in the drizzle blowing in off the Atlantic. Through the smeared glass in the shuttered metal gates, all that was visible in the gutted interior where once a vast chandelier glittered were a few strip lights, stairways covered in plywood, and a glowing red “EXIT” sign. 

Despite its disrepair, 23 Wall Street remains an emblem of the elite, a trophy in the changing game of global commerce. The address of its current owners is an office on the tenth floor of a Hong Kong skyscraper. Formerly the site of a British army barracks, 88 Queensway has been transformed into the mirrored towers of Pacific Place, blazing reflected sunlight onto the financial district. The sumptuous mall at street level, air conditioned against the dripping humidity outside, is lined with designer boutiques: Armani, Prada, Chanel, Dior. The Shangri La hotel, which occupies the top floors of the second of Pacific Place’s seven towers, offers suites at $10,000 a night. 

The office on the tenth floor is much more discreet. So is the small band of men and women who use it as the registered address for themselves and their network of companies. To those who have sought to track their evolution, they are known, unofficially, as the “Queensway Group.”1 Their interests, held through a web of complex corporate structure and secretive offshore vehicles, lie in Moscow and Manhattan, North Korea and Indonesia. Their business partners include Chinese state-owned corporations; BP, Total, and other Western oil companies; and Glencore, the giant commodity trading house based in a Swiss town. Chiefly, though, the Queensway Group’s fortune and influence flow from the natural resources that lie beneath the soils of Africa. 

Roughly equidistant—about seven thousand miles from each—between 23 Wall Street in New York and 88 Queensway in Hong Kong another skyscraper rises. The golden edifice in the center of Angola’s capital, Luanda, climbs to twenty-five stories, looking out over the bay where the Atlantic laps at southern Africa’s shores. It is called CIF Luanda One, but it is known to the locals as the Tom and Jerry Building because of the cartoons that were beamed onto its outer walls as it took shape in 2008. Inside there is a ballroom, a cigar bar, and the offices of foreign oil companies that tap the prodigious reservoirs of crude oil under the seabed. 

A solid-looking guard keeps watch at the entrance, above which flutter three flags. One is Angola’s. The second is that of China, the rising power that has lavished roads, bridges, and railways on Angola, which has in turn come to supply one in every seven barrels of the oil China imports to fire its breakneck economic growth. The yellow star of Communism adorns both flags, but these days the socialist credentials of each nation’s rulers sit uneasily with their fabulous wealth. 

The third flag does not belong to a nation but instead to the company that built the tower. On a white background, it carries three gray letters: CIF, which stands for China International Fund, one of the more visible arms of the Queensway Group’s mysterious multinational network. Combined, the three flags are ensigns of a new kind of empire. 

In 2008 I took a job as a correspondent for the Financial Times in Johannesburg. These were boom times—or, at least, they had been. Prices for the commodities that South Africa and its neighbors possess in abundance had risen inexorably since the turn of the millennium as China, India, and other fast-growing economies developed a voracious hunger for resources.  

Through the 1990s the average price for an ounce of platinum had been $470.2 A ton of copper went for $2,600, a barrel of crude oil for $22. By 2008 the platinum price had tripled to $1,500, and copper was two and a half times more expensive, at $6,800. Oil had more than quadrupled to $95, and on one day in July 2008 hit $147 a barrel. Then the American banking system blew itself up. The shockwaves rippled through the global economy, and prices for raw commodities plunged. Executives, ministers, and laid-off miners looked on aghast as the recklessness of far-off bankers imperiled the resource revenues that were Africa’s economic lifeblood. But China and the rest went on growing. Within a couple of years commodity prices were back to their pre-crisis levels. The boom resumed. 

I traversed southern Africa for a year, covering elections, coups, and corruption trials, efforts to alleviate poverty and the fortunes of the giant mining companies based in Johannesburg. In 2009 I moved to Lagos to spend two years covering west Africa’s tinderbox of nations. 

There are plenty of theories as to the causes of the continent’s penury and strife, many of which treat the 900 million people and forty-eight countries of black Africa, the region south of the Sahara desert, as a homogenous lump.3 Colonizers had ruined Africa, some of the theorists contended, its suffering compounded by the diktats of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; others considered Africans incapable of governing themselves, excessively “tribal” and innately given to corruption and violence. Then there were those who thought Africa was largely doing just fine but that journalists seeking sensational stories and charities looking to tug at donors’ heartstrings distorted its image. The prescriptions were as various and contradictory as the diagnoses: slash government spending to allow private businesses to flourish; concentrate on reforming the military, promoting “good governance” or empowering women; bombard the continent with aid; or force open African markets to drag the continent into the global economy. 

As the rich world struggled with recession, pundits, investors, and development experts began to declare that Africa, by contrast, was on the rise. Commercial indicators suggested that, thanks to an economic revolution driven by the commodity boom, a burgeoning middle class was replacing Africa’s propensity for conflict with rampant consumption of mobile  phones and expensive whiskey. But such cheery analysis was justified only in pockets of the continent. As I traveled in the Niger Delta, the crudeslicked home of Nigeria’s oil industry, or the mineral-rich battlefields of eastern Congo, I came to believe that Africa’s troves of natural resources were not going to be its salvation; instead, they were its curse. 

For more than two decades economists have tried to work out what it is about natural resources that sows havoc. “Paradoxically,” wrote Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in 2007, “despite the prospects of wealth and opportunity that accompany the discovery and extraction of oil and other natural resources, such endowments all too often impede rather than further balanced and sustainable development.”4 Analysts at the consultancy McKinsey have calculated that 69 percent of people in extreme poverty live in countries where oil, gas, and minerals play a dominant role in the economy and that average incomes in those countries are overwhelmingly below the global average.5 

The sheer number of people living in what are some of the planet’s richest states, as measured by natural resources, is staggering. According to the World Bank, the proportion of the population in extreme poverty, calculated as those living on $1.25 a day and adjusted for what that wretched sum will buy in each country, is 68 percent in Nigeria and 43 percent in Angola, respectively Africa’s first and second biggest oil and gas producers. In Zambia and Congo, whose shared border bisects Africa’s copperbelt, the extreme poverty rate is 75 percent and 88 percent, respectively. By way of comparison, 33 percent of Indians live in extreme poverty, 12 percent of Chinese, 0.7 percent of Mexicans, and 0.1 percent of Poles. 

The phenomenon that economists call the “resource curse” does not, of course, offer a universal explanation for the existence of war or hunger, in Africa or anywhere else: corruption and ethnic violence have also befallen African countries where the resource industries are a relatively insignificant part of the economy, such as Kenya. Nor is every resource-rich country doomed: just look at Norway. But more often than not, some unpleasant things happen in countries where the extractive industries, as the oil and mining businesses are known, dominate the economy. The rest  of the economy becomes distorted, as dollars pour in to buy resources. The revenue that governments receive from their nations’ resources is unearned: states simply license foreign companies to pump crude or dig up ores. This kind of income is called “economic rent” and does not make for good management. It creates a pot of money at the disposal of those who control the state. At extreme levels the contract between rulers and the ruled breaks down because the ruling class does not need to tax the people to fund the government—so it has no need of their consent. 

Unbeholden to the people, a resource-fueled regime tends to spend the national income on things that benefit its own interests: education spending falls as military budgets swell.6 The resource industry is hardwired for corruption. Kleptocracy, or government by theft, thrives. Once in power, there is little incentive to depart. An economy based on a central pot of resource revenue is a recipe for “big man” politics. The world’s four longest-serving rulers—Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and Paul Biya of Cameroon—each preside over an African state rich in oil or minerals. Between them they have ruled for 136 years. 

From Russia’s oil-fired oligarchs to the conquistadores who plundered Latin America’s silver and gold centuries ago, resource rents concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. They engender what Said Djinnit, an Algerian politician who, as the UN’s top official in west Africa, has served as a mediator in a succession of coups, calls “a struggle for survival at the highest level.”7 Survival means capturing that pot of rent. Often it means others must die. 

The resource curse is not unique to Africa, but it is at its most virulent on the continent that is at once the world’s poorest and, arguably, its richest. 

Africa accounts for 13 percent of the world’s population and just 2 percent of its cumulative gross domestic product, but it is the repository of 15 percent of the planet’s crude oil reserves, 40 percent of its gold, and 80 percent of its platinum—and that is probably an underestimate, given that the continent has been less thoroughly prospected than others.8 The richest diamond mines are in Africa, as are significant deposits of uranium, copper, iron ore, bauxite (the ore used to make aluminum), and practically  every other fruit of volcanic geology. By one calculation Africa holds about a third of the world’s hydrocarbon and mineral resources.9 

Outsiders often think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy, a continent that guzzles aid to no avail and contributes little to the global economy in return. But look more closely at the resource industry, and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010 fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction (and that is before you factor in the vast sums spirited out of the continent through corruption and tax fiddles).10 Yet the disparity between life in the places where those resources are found and the places where they are consumed gives an indication of where the benefits of the oil and mining trade accrue—and why most Africans still barely scrape by. For every woman who dies in childbirth in France, a hundred die in the desert nation of Niger, a prime source of the uranium that fuels France’s nuclear-powered economy. The average Finn or South Korean can expect to live to eighty, nurtured by economies among whose most valuable companies are, respectively, Nokia and Samsung, the world’s top two mobile phone manufacturers. By contrast, if you happen to be born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to some of the planet’s richest deposits of the minerals that are crucial to the manufacture of mobile phone batteries, you’ll be lucky to make it past fifty. 

Physical cargoes of African oil and ore go hither and thither, mainly to North America, Europe, and, increasingly, China, but by and large the continent’s natural resources flow to a global market in which traders based in London, New York, and Hong Kong set prices. If South Africa exports less gold, Nigeria less oil, or Congo less copper, the price goes up for everyone. Trade routes change: the increasing production of shale gas in the United States has reduced imports of Nigerian oil in recent years, for example, with the crude heading to Asia instead. But based on the proportion of total worldwide supply it accounts for, if you fill up your car fourteen times, one of those tanks will have been refined from African crude.11 Likewise, there is a sliver of tantalum from the badlands of eastern Congo in one in five mobile phones. 

Africa is not only disproportionately rich in natural resources; it is also disproportionately dependent on them. The International Monetary Fund defines a “resource-rich” country—a country that is at risk of succumbing to the resource curse—as one that depends on natural resources for more than a quarter of its exports. At least twenty African countries fall into this category.12 

Resources account for 11 percent of European exports, 12 percent of Asia’s, 15 percent of North America’s, 42 percent of Latin America’s, and 66 percent of Africa’s—slightly more than in the former Soviet states and slightly less than the Middle East.13 Oil and gas account for 97 percent of Nigeria’s exports and 98 percent of Angola’s, where diamonds make up much of the remainder.14 When, in the second half of 2014, commodity prices started to fall, Africa’s resource states were reminded of that dependency: the boom had led to a splurge of spending and borrowing, and the prospect of a sharp fall in resource rents made the budgets of Nigeria, Angola, and elsewhere look decidedly precarious. 

The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force; rather, what is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names. The plunder of southern Africa began in the nineteenth century, when expeditions of frontiersmen, imperial envoys, miners, merchants, and mercenaries pushed from the coast into the interior, their appetite for mineral riches whetted by the diamonds and gold around the outpost they had founded at Johannesburg. Along Africa’s Atlantic seaboard traders were already departing with slaves, gold, and palm oil. By the middle of the twentieth century crude oil was flowing from Nigeria. As European colonialists departed and African states won their sovereignty, the corporate behemoths of the resource industry retained their interests. For all the technological advances that have defined the start of the new millennium—and despite the dawning realization of the damage that fossil fuels are inflicting on the planet—the basic commodities that lie in abundance in Africa remain the primary ingredients of the global economy. 

The captains of the oil and mining industries, which comprise many of the richest multinational corporations, do not like to think of themselves as part of the problem. Some consider themselves part of the solution. “Half the world’s GDP is underpinned by resources,” Andrew Mackenzie, the chief executive of the world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, told a dinner for five hundred luminaries of the industry at Lord’s cricket ground in London in 2013. “I would argue: all of it is,” he went on. “That is the  noble purpose of our trade: to supply the economic growth that helps lift millions, if not billions, out of poverty.”15 

To mine is not necessarily to loot; there are miners, oilmen, and entire companies whose ethos and conduct run counter to the looters’. Many of the hundreds of resource executives, geologists, and financiers I have met believe they are indeed serving a noble cause—and plenty of them can make a justifiable case that, without their efforts, things would be much worse. The same goes for those African politicians and civil servants striving to harness natural resources to lift their compatriots from destitution. Yet the machinery that is looting Africa is more powerful than all of them. 

That looting machine has been modernized. Where once treaties signed at gunpoint dispossessed Africa’s inhabitants of their land, gold, and diamonds, today phalanxes of lawyers representing oil and mineral companies with annual revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars impose miserly terms on African governments and employ tax dodges to bleed profit from destitute nations. In the place of the old empires are hidden networks of multinationals, middlemen, and African potentates. These networks fuse state and corporate power. They are aligned to no nation and belong instead to the transnational elites that have flourished in the era of globalization. Above all, they serve their own enrichment. 

»1« 

Futungo, Inc. 

Little but fear and sewage flows down the precipitous slope that separates Angola’s presidential complex from the waterside slum below. Swelled by refugees who fled a civil war that raged on and off for three decades in the interior, Chicala sprawls out from the main coast road in Luanda, the capital. Periodically the ocean sends a storm tearing through the rickety dwellings. Boatmen ply the inlets, their passengers inured to the stench emanating from the waters. 

This is not the face that Angola prefers to present to the world. Since the end of the civil war in 2002 this nation of 20 million people has notched up some of the fastest rates of economic growth recorded anywhere, at times even outstripping China. Minefields have given way to new roads and railways, part of a multibillion-dollar endeavor to rebuild a country that one of the worst proxy conflicts of the Cold War had comprehensively shattered. Today Angola boasts sub-Saharan Africa’s third-biggest economy, after Nigeria and South Africa. Luanda consistently ranks at the top of surveys of the world’s most expensive cities for expatriates, ahead of Singapore, Tokyo, and Zurich. In glistening five-star hotels like the one beside Chicala, an unspectacular sandwich costs $30. The monthly rent for a top-end unfurnished three-bedroom house is $15,000.1 Luxury car dealerships do a brisk trade servicing the SUVs of those whose income has risen faster than the potholes of the clogged thoroughfares can be filled. At Ilha de Luanda, the glamorous beachside strip of bars and restaurants a short boat-ride from Chicala, the elite’s offspring go ashore from their yachts to replenish their stocks of $2,000-a-bottle Dom Pérignon. 

The railways, the hotels, the growth rates, and the champagne all flow from the oil that lies under Angola’s soils and seabed. So does the fear. 

In 1966 Gulf Oil, a US oil company that ranked among the so-called seven sisters that then dominated the industry, discovered prodigious reserves of crude in Cabinda, an enclave separated from the rest of Angola by a sliver of its neighbor, Congo. When civil war broke out following independence from Portugal in 1975, oil revenues sustained the Communist government of the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA) against the Western-backed rebels of Unita. Vast new oil finds off the coast in the 1990s raised the stakes both for the warring factions and their foreign allies. Although the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, peace came to Angola only in 2002, with the death of Jonas Savimbi, Unita’s leader. By then some five hundred thousand people had died. 

The MPLA found that the oil-fired machine it had built to power its war effort could be put to other uses. “When the MPLA dropped its Marxist garb at the beginning of the 1990s,” writes Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an authority on Angola, “the ruling elite enthusiastically converted to crony capitalism.”2 The court of the president—a few hundred families known as the Futungo, after Futungo de Belas, the old presidential palace— embarked on “the privatization of power.” 

Melding political and economic power like many a postcolonial elite, generals, MPLA bigwigs, and the family of José Eduardo dos Santos, the party’s Soviet-trained leader who assumed the presidency in 1979, took personal ownership of Angola’s riches. Isabel dos Santos, the president’s daughter, amassed interests from banking to television in Angola and Portugal. In January 2013 Forbes magazine named her Africa’s first female billionaire. 

The task of turning Angola’s oil industry from a war chest into a machine for enriching Angola’s elite in peacetime fell to a stout, full-faced man with a winning grin and a neat moustache called Manuel Vicente. Blessed with what one associate calls “a head like a computer for numbers,” as a young man he had tutored schoolchildren to supplement his meager income and support his family. After a stint as an apprentice fitter, he studied electrical engineering. Though he had been raised by a lowly Luanda shoemaker  and his washerwoman wife, Vicente ended up in the fold of dos Santos’s sister, thereby securing a family tie to the president. 

While other MPLA cadres studied in Baku or Moscow and returned to Angola to fight the bush war against Unita, Vicente honed his English and his knowledge of the oil industry at Imperial College in London. Back home he began his rise through the oil hierarchy. In 1999, as the war entered its endgame, dos Santos appointed him to run Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company that serves, in the words of Paula Cristina Roque, an Angola expert, as the “chief economic motor” of a “shadow government controlled and manipulated by the presidency.”3 

Vicente built Sonangol into a formidable operation. He drove hard bargains with the oil majors that have spent tens of billions of dollars developing Angola’s offshore oilfields, among them BP of the UK and Chevron and ExxonMobil of the United States. Despite the tough negotiations, Angola dazzled the majors and their executives respected Vicente. “Angola is for us a land of success,” said Jacques Marraud des Grottes, head of African exploration and production for Total of France, which pumped more of the country’s crude than anyone else.4 

On Vicente’s watch oil production almost tripled, approaching 2 million barrels a day—more than one in every fifty barrels pumped worldwide. Angola vied with Nigeria for the crown of Africa’s top oil exporter and became China’s second-biggest supplier, after Saudi Arabia, while also shipping significant quantities to Europe and the United States. Sonangol awarded itself stakes in oil ventures operated by foreign companies and used the revenues to push its tentacles into every corner of the domestic economy: property, health care, banking, aviation. It even has a professional football team. The foyer of the ultramodern tower in central Luanda that houses its headquarters is lined with marble, with comfortable seats for the droves of emissaries from West and East who come to seek crude and contracts. Few gain access to the highest floors of a company likened by one foreigner who has worked with it to “the Kremlin without the smiles.” In 2011 Sonangol’s $34 billion in revenues rivaled those of Amazon and Coca-Cola. 

Oil accounts for 98 percent of Angola’s exports and about three-quarters of the government’s income. It is also the lifeblood of the Futungo. When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola’s national accounts in 2011, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing, a sum greater than the gross domestic product of each of forty-three African countries and equivalent to one in every four dollars that the Angolan economy generates annually.5 Most of the missing money could be traced to off-the-books spending by Sonangol; $4.2 billion was completely unaccounted for. 

Having expanded the Futungo’s looting machine, Manuel Vicente graduated to the inner sanctum. Already a member of the MPLA’s politburo, he briefly served in a special post in charge of economic coordination before his appointment as dos Santos’s vice president, all the while retaining his role as Angola’s Mr. Oil. He left Sonangol’s downtown headquarters for the acacia-shaded villas of the cidade alta, the hilltop enclave built by Portuguese colonizers that serves today as the nerve center of the Futungo. 

Like its Chinese counterparts, the Futungo embraced capitalism without relaxing its grip on political power. It was not until 2012, after thirty-three years as president, that dos Santos won a mandate from the electorate— and only then after stacking the polls in his favor. Critics and protesters have been jailed, beaten, tortured, and executed.6 Although Angola is not a police state, the fear is palpable. An intelligence chief is purged, an airplane malfunctions, some activists are ambushed, and everyone realizes that they are potential targets. Security agents stand on corners, letting it be known that they are watching. No one wants to speak on the phone because they assume others are listening. 

On the morning of Friday, February 10, 2012, the oil industry was buzzing with excitement. Cobalt International Energy, a Texan exploration company, had announced a sensational set of drilling results. At a depth beneath the Angolan seabed equivalent to half the height of Mount Everest, Cobalt had struck what it called a “world-class” reservoir of oil. The find had opened up one of the most promising new oil frontiers, with Cobalt perfectly placed either to pump the crude itself or sell up to one of the majors and earn a handsome profit for its owners. When the New York stock market opened, Cobalt’s shares rocketed. At one stage they were up 38 percent, a huge movement in a market where stocks rarely move by more than  a couple of percentage points. By the end of the day the company’s market value stood at $13.3 billion, $4 billion more than the previous evening. 

For Joe Bryant, Cobalt’s founding chairman and chief executive, a punt based on prehistoric geology appeared to have paid off spectacularly. A hundred million years ago, before tectonic shifts tore them apart, the Americas and Africa had been a single landmass—the two shores of the southern Atlantic resemble one another closely. In 2006 oil companies had pierced the thick layer of salt under the Brazilian seabed and found a load of crude. An analogous salt layer stretched out from Angola. Bryant and his geologists wondered whether the same treasure might lie beneath the Angolan salt layer. 

Bryant had worked as the head of BP’s lucrative operations in Angola, where he cultivated the Futungo. “Joe Bryant made himself an inner-circle oilman very quickly,” a well-connected Angola expert told me. French executives were known to be “haughty,” but Bryant made friends in Luanda. “He knows how to get on with them, how to speak with them,” the expert said. In 2005 Bryant decided to strike out on his own and founded Cobalt, taking BP’s head of exploration with him and setting up an office in Houston, the capital of the US oil industry. “We were literally going from my garage to competing with the biggest companies in the world,” Bryant recalled.7 

Bryant needed backers with deep pockets. He found them on Wall Street. Traders at Goldman Sachs had long played the commodities markets; Goldman’s razor-sharp bankers oversaw mergers and acquisitions between resources groups. Now, in Cobalt, it would have its own oil company. Goldman and two of the wealthiest US private equity funds, Carlyle and Riverstone, together put up $500 million to launch Cobalt. 

In July 2008, as Cobalt was negotiating exploration rights to put its theory about the potential of Angola’s “presalt” oil frontier to the test, the Angolans made a stipulation. Cobalt would have to take two little-known local companies as junior partners in the venture, each with a minority stake. Ostensibly the demand was part of the regime’s avowed goal of helping Angolans to gain a foothold in an industry that provides just 1 percent of jobs despite generating almost all the country’s export revenue. Accordingly, in 2010 Cobalt signed a contract in which it held a 40 percent stake  in the venture and would be the operator. Sonangol, the state oil company, had 20 percent. The two local private companies, Nazaki Oil and Gáz and Alper Oil, were given 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Exploration began in earnest. Even before the jaw-dropping find Cobalt’s geologists had christened their Angolan prospect “Gold Dust.”8 At the height of the rally in Cobalt stock after it unveiled its Angolan find, Goldman Sachs’s shares in the company were worth $2.7 billion. Cobalt moved across Houston to shimmering new headquarters close to the majors’ offices. One visitor to Joe Bryant’s office at the Cobalt Center noted the stunning view over the city. “Cobalt,” remarked a local realtor, “is going to be a huge Houston success story.”9 

There was just one snag. What Cobalt had not revealed—indeed, what the company maintains it did not know—was that three of the most powerful men in Angola owned secret stakes in its partner, Nazaki Oil and Gáz. One of them was Manuel Vicente. As the boss of Sonangol at the time of Cobalt’s deal, he oversaw the award of oil concessions and the terms of the contracts. The other two concealed owners of Nazaki were scarcely less influential. Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento, a former general known as Dino, has interests from telecoms to oil trading. 

In 2010 he was appointed adviser to Nazaki’s third powerful owner, General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Júnior, better known as Kopelipa. One veteran of Futungo politics who has clashed with Kopelipa told me that, should the day of Kopelipa’s downfall ever come, “the people in the streets will tear him to pieces for what he has done in the past.” 

As the head of the military bureau in the presidency, he presides over security services that keep the Futungo protected by whatever means necessary. Some even dare to call him “o chefe do boss”—the boss of the boss.10 During the war he served as intelligence chief and coordinated the MPLA’s arms purchases.11 More recently he has emerged as the foremost of the “business generals,” the senior figures in the security establishment who have translated their influence into stakes in diamonds, oil, and any other sector that looks lucrative. Between them this trio formed the core of the Futungo’s commercial enterprise. 

A long-neglected 1977 statute prohibits American companies from participating in the privatization of power in far-off lands. Updated in 1998, the  Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a crime for a company that has operations in the United States to pay or offer money or anything of value to foreign officials to win business. It covers both companies themselves and their officers. For years after it was passed the FCPA was more of a laudable ideal than a law with teeth. However, from the late-2000s the agencies that were supposed to enforce it—the Department of Justice, which brings criminal cases, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock market regulator, which handles civil cases—started to do so with gusto. They went after some big names, including BAE Systems, Royal Dutch Shell, and a former subsidiary of Halliburton called Kellogg Brown & Root. All three admitted FCPA or FCPA-related infringements, and the cases resulted in fines and profit disgorgements totaling more than a billion dollars—though such amounts scarcely dent the profits of companies this big. 

Oil and mining companies have been the subject of more cases under the FCPA and similar laws passed elsewhere than any other sector.12 Indeed, the Halliburton and Shell settlements both concerned bribery in Nigeria. Companies want rights to specific geographical areas under the most favorable terms possible. For the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa’s resource states, capturing some of the rent that resource companies pay the state in exchange for lucrative territory—or capturing a position as a gatekeeper to that territory—is by far the most direct route to riches. 

Delivering a suitcase stuffed with cash is only the simplest way to enrich local officials via oil and mining ventures run by foreign companies. A more sophisticated technique involves local companies, often with scant background in the resource industries. These companies are awarded a stake at the beginning of an oil and or mining project alongside the foreign corporations that will do the digging and the drilling. Sometimes genuine local businessmen own such companies. Sometimes, though, they are merely front companies whose owners are the very officials who influence or control the granting of rights to oil and mining prospects and who are seeking to turn that influence into a share of the profits. In the latter case the foreign oil or mining company risks falling foul of anti corruption laws at home. But often front companies’ ultimate owners are concealed behind layers of corporate secrecy. One reason why foreign resources companies conduct what is known as “due diligence” before embarking on investments abroad is to seek to establish who really owns their local partners. In some cases due diligence investigations amount, in the words of a former top banker, to “manufacturing deniability.” In others the due diligence work raises so many red flags about a prospective deal that a company will simply abandon it. Frequently the evidence that a due diligence investigation amasses about corruption risks is inconclusive. Then it is up to the company to decide whether to proceed. 

In 2007, as its Angolan ambitions started to take shape, Cobalt retained Vinson & Elkins and O’Melveny & Myers, two venerable American law firms, to conduct its due diligence. Corporate records are not easy to obtain in Angola, even though any company is supposed to be allowed access to its partners’ records. I was able to get hold of Nazaki’s registration documents, and its influential trio of owners appear nowhere on them. But there were some clues. One document names a man called José Domingos Manuel as one of Nazaki’s seven shareholders and the company’s designated manager. His name also appears alongside those of Vicente, Kopelipa, and Dino on the shareholder list for a separate oil venture.13 That might have raised a red flag for any company considering going into business with Nazaki: it demonstrated a clear link between one Nazaki shareholder and three of the most powerful men in the Futungo. (José Domingos Manuel, I was told by two people who know the Futungo well, had been a senior officer in the military and was a known associate of Kopelipa.) There was another red flag: six of Nazaki’s seven shareholders were named individuals, but the seventh was a company called Grupo Aquattro Internacional. Aquattro’s own registration documents do not name its own shareholders. But they are Vicente, Kopelipa, and Dino. 

In 2010, two years after the Angolan authorities had first told Cobalt that they wanted it to make Nazaki its partner, a crusading Angolan anti corruption activist called Rafael Marques de Morais published a report claiming that Vicente, Kopelipa, and Dino were the true owners of Aquattro and, thus, of Nazaki.14 “Their dealings acknowledge no distinction between public and private affairs,” he wrote. Nazaki was just one cog in a system of plunder, which meant that “the spoils of power in Angola are shared by the few, while the many remain poor.”15 

At least one due-diligence investigator was aware of what Cobalt says it was unable to establish. In the first half of 2010 an investigator—we shall  call him Jones—exchanged a series of memos with Control Risks, one of the biggest companies in corporate intelligence. Control Risks, the correspondence shows, had launched “Project Benihana,” an endeavor apparently codenamed after a Florida-based chain of Japanese restaurants, to look into Nazaki. Jones, a seasoned Angola hand, warned his contact at Control Risks that oil concessions in Angola were only ever granted if the MPLA and the business elite stood to benefit. He went on to name Kopelipa as one of the men behind Nazaki. No client is named in the correspondence. (In most such cases the freelance investigators are not told on whose behalf they are ultimately working.) Both Cobalt and Control Risks refused to say whether the Texan group was the client in this case. But what is clear is that the warnings were there to be found. At least one other due-diligence investigation I am aware of also got wind of Nazaki’s Futungo connections.16 

By its own account Cobalt went ahead with a deal in a country that was, in 2010, ranked at 168 out of 178 countries in Transparency International’s annual corruption perceptions index, without knowing the true identity of its partner, a company with no track record in the industry and registered to an address on a Luanda backstreet that I found impossible to locate when I went looking for it in 2012. 

When US authorities informed Cobalt that they had launched a formal investigation into its Angolan operations, the company maintained that everything was above board. With none of the fanfare that accompanied its cork-popping announcement of its big discovery earlier the same month off the Atlantic coast, Cobalt disclosed the investigation in its annual statement to shareholders. “Nazaki has repeatedly denied the allegations in writing,” Cobalt told its shareholders, going on to say that it had “conducted an extensive investigation into these allegations and believe that our activities in Angola have complied with all laws, including the FCPA.” 

Two months later, when I wrote to Joe Bryant to ask him about the allegations, Cobalt’s lawyer replied and went further: Cobalt’s “extensive and ongoing” due diligence “has not found any credible support for [the] central allegation that Angolan government officials, and specifically [Vicente, Kopelipa and Dino] . . . have any ownership in Nazaki.” Referring to its massive discovery a few weeks earlier, Cobalt’s lawyer added, “Success naturally brings with it many challenges. One of those challenges is responding to unfounded allegations.” 

The problem for Cobalt was that the allegations were not unfounded. I had also written to Vicente, Kopelipa, and Dino, laying out the evidence that they owned stakes in Nazaki, which I had gathered from documents and interviews. Vicente and Kopelipa wrote near-identical letters back, confirming that they and Dino did indeed own Aquattro and thus held secret stakes in Nazaki but insisting that there was nothing wrong with that. They had held their Nazaki stakes, “always respecting all Angolan legislation applicable to such activities, not having committed any crime of abuse of power and/or trafficking of influence to obtain illicit shareholder advantages.” The holdings had, in any case, been “recently dissolved.” If US law led Cobalt to pull out of Angola, Kopelipa and Vicente went on, others would be keen to take its place.17 

In Manuel Vicente’s offices in Luanda’s hilltop presidential complex the only sound was the purr of the air conditioning unit that kept the rooms at a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the taps of a hammer as laborers conducted some early-morning maintenance outside. A Mercedes and a Land Cruiser stood ready to part the traffic if the minister needed to venture beyond the tall red-brown wall surrounding the compound. The sole adornment on the beige walls was a portrait of dos Santos in a gold frame. 

Vicente swept in, wearing a smart suit and looking fresh from his morning jog. If he was annoyed that I had named him as the beneficiary of a questionable oil deal two months earlier, he didn’t show it. Indeed, as Vicente styled it, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. If, while he was the head of Sonangol, he had knowingly owned a stake in the company assigned to be a foreign group’s local partner, that would have been “a conflict of interests,” he acknowledged.18 But Vicente, a man with a reputation for ruthless competence and a commanding knowledge of Angola’s oil industry, claimed he had not known that Aquattro, the investment company he shared with Kopelipa and Dino, had owned a stake in Nazaki, Cobalt’s local partner. When “all this news came,” revealing that he did indeed own a stake in Nazaki, “we decided to quit,” he said. His interest in Nazaki had been “liquidated” the previous year, he said. “Today I’m not director and direct beneficiary of Nazaki.” 

Vicente’s position was essentially the same as Cobalt’s: if there was anything untoward in the oil deal, they were ignorant of it. Vicente told me that he knew Joe Bryant “very well.” Their relationship had stretched back years beyond the formation of Cobalt to when Bryant worked for Amoco, an American oil company that merged with BP in 1998. That relationship, it seemed to me, might have provided a simple way to check whether Vicente and his friends secretly owned stakes in Nazaki. Bryant could just have asked Vicente whether the rumors were true. I asked Vicente: Did you and Bryant ever discuss the matter? “No,” he said. 

Alongside their personal stakes in the oil business, the members of the Futungo ensure that the oil revenues that accrue to the Angolan state are deployed to serve the regime’s purposes. Angola’s 2013 budget allocated 18 percent of public spending to defense and public order, 5 percent to health, and 8 percent to education. That means the government spent 1.4 times as much on defense as it did on health and schools combined. By comparison, the UK spent four times as much on health and education as on defense. Angola spends a greater share of its budget on the military than South Africa’s apartheid government did during the 1980s, when it was seeking to crush mounting resistance at home and was fomenting conflict in its neighbors.19 

Generous fuel subsidies are portrayed as a salve for the poor, but in truth they mainly benefit only those wealthy enough to afford a car and politically connected enough to win a fuel-import license. Angola’s government has ploughed petrodollars into contracts for roads, housing, railways, and bridges at a rate of $15 billion a year in the decade to 2012, a huge sum for a country of 20 million people. Roads are getting better, railways are slowly snaking into the interior, but the construction blitz has also proved a bonanza for embezzlers: kickbacks are estimated to account for more than a quarter of the final costs of government construction contracts.20 And much of the funding is in the form of oil-backed credit from China, much of which is marshaled by a special office that General Kopelipa has run for . “The country is getting a new face,” says Elias Isaac, one of Angola’s most prominent anti corruption campaigners. “But is it getting a new soul?”21 

Manuel Vicente was keen to correct the impression that Angola’s rulers have abdicated their duties toward their citizens. “Just to assure you, the government is really serious, engaged in combating, in fighting the poverty,” he told me.22 “We are serious people, we know very well our job, and we know very well our responsibility.” Talking with him, I had no doubt that there was some part of Vicente that wanted to better the lot of his compatriots, or at least to be seen to be trying to do so. “I’m a Christian guy,” he said. “It doesn’t work if you are okay and the people around have nothing to eat. You don’t feel comfortable.” 

There are two solutions to that problem: share some food or dump the hungry out of sight. The Futungo’s record suggests it favors the latter. 

António Tomás Ana has lived in Chicala since 1977, before new arrivals fleeing the civil war in the interior turned what had been a sleepy fishing settlement into the profusion of humanity it is today, sandwiched between the ocean and the slopes rising up to the presidential complex. Better known as Etona, he is one of Angola’s foremost artists. At an openair workshop walled with breezeblocks, his assistants chip away at acacia trunks with chisels and mallets. One of his trademark sinewy wooden sculptures graces the lobby at Sonangol headquarters. 

Among Etona’s sixty-five thousand neighbors in Chicala are military officers and a professional photographer who brings in $5,000 a month, which does not go far in ultracostly Luanda but has allowed him to build up the corrugated-iron shack he bought twenty-five years ago into the angular but solid edifice around which his grandchildren gallivant today. In June 2012 that house, like Etona’s workshop and the community library he is building, were, along with the rest of Chicala, scheduled to be flattened—and not, this time, by the ocean. 

Given the choice, few people would choose to live with Chicala’s meager amenities and opportunities. The ruling party promised electricity during the 2008 election campaign, but little arrived, and not much had come of the latest pledge, made in the run-up to the 2012 polls, to provide piped water. But places like Chicala are communities, with their own ways  and their own comradeship. An estimated three in every four of Luanda’s inhabitants, out of a total population of between 5 and 8 million, live in slums known as musseques. Although conditions in some, like the precarious settlement on top of a rubbish dump, are dire, Chicala and other central musseques have their advantages. Work, formal or informal, is close at hand in Luanda’s commercial districts.

Etona spends a lot of time thinking about the betterment of a slum he could easily have afforded to leave. “Regeneration is not about roads and sidewalks—it’s in the mind,” he told me when we met at his workshop, his red shirt pristine despite the afternoon heat.23 “This,” he said, waving an arm at the bustling slum, where nearby youngsters were furiously dueling at table football, “this is also part of the culture, part of the country.” But Chicala’s days were numbered. Its inhabitants were to be relocated, whether they liked it or not, to new settlements on the outskirts of Luanda. A new luxury hotel and the gleaming offices of an American oil company had risen on the fringes of Chicala, harbingers of what was to take the neighborhood’s place. A beach that once buzzed with fish restaurants and bars had been fenced off, ready for the developers. 

The Chicala residents I spoke to regarded the authorities’ promises of a better life elsewhere with deep suspicion. About three thousand had already been shipped off, some rounded up by police and packed with their belongings into trucks, any objections ignored. The government has been willing to use force to cleanse the slums, deploying troops by helicopter to conduct dawn evictions.24 But Etona, for one, intended to resist when his turn came. “If we don’t speak out, we will be carried off to Zango.” 

Zango lies just over twelve miles south of central Luanda, where the capital’s sprawl thins out, giving way to the ochre scrub of the bush. Like a matching settlement to the north, it is supposed to represent a new beginning for Angola’s slum-dwellers. To listen to officials, Zango is the promised land. “We are moving them to more dignified accommodation,” Rosa Palavera, the head of the poverty reduction unit in the presidency, told me.25 “There are no basic services [in Chicala]. There is crime.” 

Even if one overlooks the official neglect that lies behind the lack of amenities in Chicala, Zango is hardly preferable. Those who moved to Zango were lucky if they found basic services merely on a par with those they  had left behind.26 Sometimes the new houses were even smaller than the old ones. In aerial photographs the new settlements looked like prison camps, with their squat dwellings arranged in unvarying rows. Shacks that were far more rickety than anything in Chicala had sprung up too. Those who tried to make a go of it by commuting back from Zango into the city each departed well before dawn and returned at midnight, scarcely leaving enough time to sleep, let alone see their children. Other new arrivals simply went straight back to Chicala, a daring move given that the slum lies within the purview of the military bureau run by General Kopelipa, the feared security chief. 

On the drive from Zango back toward the center of Luanda, the road crosses the invisible frontier that separates the majority of Angolans from the enclave of plenty that the petro-economy has created. The gleaming new settlement at Kilamba was constructed from scratch by a Chinese company at a cost of $3.5 billion. The guards on duty at the gates adopted an intimidating strut as we drove toward them down the long, curving driveway. They let my companions and me through in exchange for the price of a bottle of water. Inside the atmosphere was eerie, reminiscent of one of those disaster movies in which some catastrophe has removed all trace of life. Nothing stirred in the dry heat. Row after parallel row of gleaming, pastel-colored apartment blocks between five and ten stories high stretched to a vanishing point at the horizon, tracked by manicured grass verges and pylons carrying electricity lines. The roads were like silk, the best in Angola. Outside the most affluent parts of South Africa, particularly the gated communities known to their more poetic detractors as “yuppie kennels,” I had seen nothing in Africa that looked anything like Kilamba. 

The newly completed units were for sale for between $120,000 and $300,000 apiece to those rich enough to escape the crush of central Luanda. The first residents of Kilamba’s twenty thousand apartments were said to have moved in, but there was no sign of them. About half of Angola’s population live below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day; it would take them each about 260 years to earn enough to buy the cheapest apartment in Kilamba.27 The prices came down after an official visit by the president, but nonetheless only the wealthiest Angolans could afford to live there. 

Teams of Chinese laborers in blue overalls and hard hats trundled into view in pickup trucks. Like other Chinese construction projects in Africa, Kilamba was built with Chinese finance and Chinese labor, and it formed part of a bigger bargain that ensured Chinese access to natural resources— in this case, Angola’s oil. The Chinese and Angolan flags fluttered above Kilamba’s entrance. This was a flagship project for China’s undertaking in Africa: Xi Jinping toured the site while it was under construction in 2010, three years before he ascended from the Chinese vice presidency to the presidency. A vast billboard proclaimed that Citic, the Chinese state-owned conglomerate whose operations span banking, resources, and construction, had built the new town. Oversight of the construction had been assigned to Sonangol, which subcontracted the management of the sales of apartments to a company called Delta Imobiliária. Delta was said to belong to the private business empire of Manuel Vicente and General Kopelipa. Both men were perfectly placed to use the power of the public office to dispense personal gain for themselves, just as they had been assigned concealed stakes in Cobalt’s oil venture. Kilamba was, in the words of the Angolan campaigner Rafael Marques de Morais, “a veritable model for African corruption.”28 

Hexplosivo Mental raps with intensity—brow furrowed, left hand gripping the microphone, right hand chopping through the air. Like Public Enemy and other exponents of protest rap before him, he makes it his business to attack the abuses of the mighty. A rangy figure in a hoodie, he gives loud and lyrical voice to dissent in Angola that had long been mostly whispered, exhorting a counterpunch against the ruling class’s monopoly on wealth and power with tracks like “How It Feels to Be Poor,” “Reaction of the Masses,” and “Be Free.” 

One Tuesday in May 2012 a group of ten young Angolans gathered at the Luanda home of one of a new generation of politically conscious rappers. Hexplosivo Mental was among them. They had been involved in organizing the small but concerted demonstrations that had rattled the regime. In the vanguard of protest against the Futungo’s power, the group had had brushes with the authorities before, notably when the police dispersed their demos.  

This was not the first time the house had been raided. But the band of fifteen men who turned up at just after ten that night wanted to teach the dissidents a more serious lesson.29 Elections at which dos Santos planned to ensure a thumping victory were three months away, and the deployment of oil money alone would not be enough to neutralize public displays of opposition to his rule. Bursting through the door, the men bore down upon their victims with iron bars and machetes, breaking arms, fracturing skulls, and spilling blood. Their work done, they zoomed away in Land Cruisers. One account of the attack alleged that the vehicles belonged to the police—evidence that the assailants were part of one of the pro-regime militias whose task was to instill fear ahead of the polls. 

No one died that night, but when I spoke to Hexplosivo Mental weeks later, his badly injured arm was still being treated. We arranged to meet discreetly at a busy roundabout in Luanda. I waited thirty minutes or so before he called to say he had had to go back to the hospital. When he spoke later by phone the young rapper put it simply: “Before, we did not know how to protest. Now we are growing.” 

There were some serious anti government demonstrations in the run-up to the elections, but if Hexplosivo Mental and his comrades hoped to mount a challenge to an entrenched regime on the scale of the Arab Spring revolutions that had erupted far to the north, they did so in vain. The amount of official funding available to political parties was slashed from $1.2 million in the legislative elections of 2008 to $97,000. Meanwhile, the MPLA was said to have spent $75 million on its campaign.30 

The MPLA has genuine support, especially in the coastal cities that were its bastion during the war and among those Angolans so traumatized by the conflict that they see a vote for any incumbent, no matter how venal, as the option that carries the smallest risk of a return to hostilities. The regime leaves little to chance, dominating the media, appointing its stooges to run the institutions that conduct elections, co-opting opposition politicians, and intimidating opponents. Kopelipa presided over an electoral apparatus that left 3.6 million people unable to cast their ballots—almost as many votes as the MPLA received.31 The MPLA’s share of the vote fell nine points compared to the 2008 election, but it still recorded a landslide victory, with 72 percent. Under a new system the first name on the winning party’s list would become president. More than three decades after he took power, dos Santos could claim he had a mandate to rule, despite the findings of a reputable opinion poll that showed he enjoyed the approval of just 16 percent of Angolans.32 

In August 2014, three years after the US authorities had begun their corruption investigation into its Angolan deal, Cobalt issued a statement revealing that the Securities and Exchange Commission had given notice that it might launch a civil case against the company.33 “The company has fully co-operated with the SEC in this matter and intends to continue to do so,” Cobalt announced. Joe Bryant called the SEC’s decision “erroneous” and said Cobalt would continue to develop its Angolan prospects. At the time of writing no proceedings have been brought, and Cobalt continues to deny wrongdoing, as it has throughout. Cobalt’s share price, which took a billion-dollar hit after news of its secret Angolan partners emerged and declined even further after some mediocre drilling results, fell another 10 percent when the SEC’s warning emerged. 

Cobalt’s founders have already turned a tidy profit. Between February 2012, when Cobalt revealed that it was under formal investigation, and that April, when Kopelipa and Vicente confirmed to me that they and Dino held stakes in Nazaki, Joe Bryant sold 860,000 of his shares in the company for $24 million. Between the start of the corruption investigation and the end of 2013—during which period Cobalt also struck oil in the Gulf of Mexico—Goldman Sachs, a joint Riverstone-Carlyle fund, and First Reserve, another big American private equity firm, each made sales of Cobalt stock worth a net $1 billion.34 

I tried to find out who had taken over the stake in Nazaki that, according to Vicente, he, Kopelipa, and Dino had “liquidated” as well as whether their business associates were still shareholders, but neither the trio nor the company itself would tell me. In February 2013 Nazaki transferred half its interest to Sonangol, the state oil company. The official journal did not disclose the size of any fee that Sonangol paid for the stake, but bankers’ valuations indicated it was worth about $1.3 billion, at least fourteen times the amount Nazaki would have been expected to pay in development costs  up to that point.35 If any fee was paid, it represented a transfer of funds from the coffers of a state where the vast majority live in penury to a private company linked to the Futungo. Then, in 2014, three weeks after Cobalt disclosed that it was facing possible proceedings by the SEC, the company announced it had severed ties with Nazaki and with Alper, whose ownership remains undisclosed. Both companies transferred their stakes in Cobalt’s venture to Sonangol. Again, none of the parties involved revealed what, if any, fees were paid.36 

Cobalt is just one among dozens of companies vying for Angolan crude, and Nazaki was but a single cog in the Futungo’s machine for turning its control over the state into private gain. 

Just before Christmas 2011, as Manuel Vicente was preparing to hand over the reins of Sonangol to his successor and with the expenses of the following year’s election looming, seven international oil companies snapped up operating rights to eleven new blocks in the Atlantic. The acreage was in the “presalt” zone, where Cobalt was already exploring. As in previous bidding rounds in Angola and elsewhere, the companies agreed to pay signature bonuses. These are upfront payments that oil companies make to governments when they win rights to explore a block, often through auctions. The payments are perfectly legal, though frequently the amounts paid are not disclosed. If they were delivered on the sly to officials, such payments would be called bribes; instead, they are deposited in the leaky treasuries of oil states. 

Any Angolans curious to know how much their government had brought in from the auction would be disappointed. Mindful that in 2001 BP had been threatened with ejection after it announced plans to publish some details of its Angolan contracts, the oil companies kept the terms of the bonuses safely shrouded. Norway’s Statoil made something resembling a disclosure. It said its total “financial commitment” for two oil blocks, where it would be the operator of the project, and working interests in three other blocks came to $1.4 billion, “including signature bonuses and a minimum work commitment.” The regime’s overall take from the whole bidding round would have been a multiple of that figure. 

Both the Futungo’s business ventures and the state institutions’ activities are kept within a fortress of secrecy, so much so that Edward George,  an Angola specialist who has studied dos Santos’s rule for many years, calls the regime a “cryptocracy”—a system of government in which the levers of power are hidden. 

When I met Isaías Samakuva at a London hotel one afternoon in early 2014 he had been the leader of Unita, today Angola’s main opposition political party, for more than a decade. Samakuva has spent his life fighting a losing battle, but he remains eloquent and composed. He had been posted in London as Unita’s representative in the 1980s and had come back to see family and try to lobby against what he saw as Western powers’ readiness to cozy up to dos Santos in order to safeguard their companies’ access to Angolan oil. “The international community itself protects these guys,” Samakuva told me, sipping a cup of tea.37 “Their money is not actually in Angola. They deal with the banks in Portugal, in Britain, in Brazil, the United States. The only explanation that we can find is that they have the blessing of the international community.” 

The eruptions of the Arab Spring were giving dos Santos the pretext to tighten security still further, Samakuva went on. “Dos Santos is so entrenched in power that he won’t allow what happened in Egypt.” Samakuva added, “We have to have real peace, not just for them and their interests.” 

Samakuva does not doubt that the key to the Futungo’s survival lies in the shadowy structures of the oil industry. “There’s no separation between private and state,” he said. “There’s no transparency. No one knows what is the property of Mr. dos Santos and his family.” I asked him about one particular company. “I think it is the key to all the support that is given to Mr. dos Santos, to his rule.” How can one company provide such vital support, I asked. “We can only speculate. Everything is in the dark.” 

The company Samakuva was talking about operates from the golden Luanda One tower. It is the sister company to China International Fund, whose flag flies above the entrance and which has raised billions for infrastructure projects under undisclosed terms, among them an expansion of Kilamba.38 Cobalt, Nazaki, and other oil groups have offices on the lower levels, but the top floors are reserved for the company that Samakuva had in mind—China Sonangol. Since 2004 China Sonangol has amassed stakes  in a dozen Angolan oil ventures, including some of the most prolific, as well as a slice of the country’s richest diamond mine. Sonangol, the state oil company that is the Futungo’s financial engine, owns 30 percent of China Sonangol. The remainder belongs to the band of Hong Kong–based investors that is known as the Queensway Group and is fronted by a bearded, bespectacled Chinese man called Sam Pa.

2 

“It Is Forbidden to Piss in the Park” 

It is hard to imagine a place more beautiful than the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The valleys are a higher order of green, dense with the generous, curving leaves of banana plants and the smaller, jagged ones of cassava shrubs. The hillsides are a vertiginous patchwork of plots. Just before dusk each day the valleys fill with a spectral mist, as though Earth itself had exhaled. The slopes drop down to Lake Kivu, one of the smaller of central Africa’s great lakes but still large enough to cover Luxembourg. On some days the waters lap serenely; on others, when the wind gets up, the lake turns slate-gray and froths. At the northern shore stand the Virunga, Lake Kivu’s crown of volcanoes. 

Beneath the beauty there is danger. From time to time the volcanoes tip lava onto the towns below. Cholera bacteria lie in wait in Lake Kivu’s shallows. Deeper and more menacing still are the methane and carbon dioxide dissolved in the water, enough to send an asphyxiating cloud over the heavily populated settlements on the shores should a tectonic spasm upset the lake’s chemical balance. 

But there is something else that lies under eastern Congo: minerals as rich as the hillsides are lush. Here there are ores bearing gold, tin, and tungsten—and another known as columbite-tantalite, or coltan for short. Coltan contains a metal whose name tantalum is derived from that of the Greek mythological figure Tantalus. Although the Greek gods favored him, he was “not able to digest his great prosperity, and for his greed he gained overpowering ruin.”1 His eternal punishment was to stand up to his chin in water that, when he tried to drink, receded, and beneath trees whose branches would be blown out of reach when he tried to pluck their fruit. His story is a parable not just for the East but for the whole of a country the size of western Europe that groans with natural riches but whose people are tormented by penury. The Congolese are consistently rated as the planet’s poorest people, significantly worse off than other destitute Africans. In the decade from 2000, the Congolese were the only nationality whose gross domestic product per capita, a rough measure of average incomes, was less than a dollar a day.2 

Tantalum’s extremely high melting point and conductivity mean that electronic components made from it can be much smaller than those made from other metals. It is because tantalum capacitors can be small that the designers of electronic gadgets have been able to make them ever more compact and, over the past couple of decades, ubiquitous. 

Congo is not the only repository of tantalum-bearing ores. Campaigners and reporters perennially declare that eastern Congo holds 80 percent of known stocks, but the figure is without foundation. Based on what sketchy data there are, Michael Nest, the author of a study of coltan, calculates that Congo and surrounding countries have about 10 percent of known reserves of tantalum-bearing ores.3 The real figures might be much higher, given that reserves elsewhere have been much more comprehensively assessed. Nonetheless, Congo still ranks as the second-most important producer of tantalum ores, after Australia, accounting for what Nest estimates to be 20 percent of annual supplies. Depending on the vagaries of supply chains, if you have a PlayStation or a pacemaker, an iPod, a laptop, or a mobile phone, there is roughly a one-in-five chance that a tiny piece of eastern Congo is pulsing within it. 

The insatiable demand for consumer electronics has exacted a terrible price. The coltan trade has helped fund local militias and foreign armies that have terrorized eastern Congo for two decades, turning what should be a paradise into a crucible of war. 

Edouard Mwangachuchu Hizi avoided the brutal end that befell many of his fellow Congolese Tutsi as the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of  1994 spilled across the border, but he suffered nonetheless. The son of a well-to-do cattle farmer, Mwangachuchu was in his early forties and working as a financial adviser to the local government in Goma, the lakeside capital of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province, when extremist Hutus on the other side of the water in Rwanda embarked on what is reckoned to be the fastest mass extermination in history, butchering eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutus in one hundred days. Two million people fled, many of them into eastern Congo, where analogous ethnic tensions were already simmering. 

On his way to work one day in 1995 a mob dragged Mwangachuchu from his jeep.4 He was choked with his tie and stripped. The mob dumped him at the border with Rwanda, where Tutsi rebels had seized control from the Hutu-led government following the genocide. His herds slaughtered, Mwangachuchu found himself among the flotsam of war, albeit more fortunate than those consigned to the squalid refugee camps beside Lake Kivu. He was granted asylum in the United States in 1996, along with his wife and six children. 

Mwangachuchu watched from afar as the Hutu génocidaires licked their wounds in eastern Congo and began to launch raids against the new Tutsi-led authorities in Rwanda. He looked on from Maryland as Paul Kagame, the steely guerrilla who had become Rwanda’s leader, and his regional allies plucked an obscure Congolese Marxist rebel called Laurent-Désiré Kabila from exile in Tanzania to head a rebel alliance that swept through eastern Congo. The rebels perpetrated revenge massacres against Rwandan Hutu refugees and génocidaires as they went and then pushed on westward across a country the size of western Europe, all the way to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. They toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, the decrepit kleptocrat, and installed Kabila as president in 1997. But Kabila barely had time to change the country’s name from Zaïre to the Democratic Republic of Congo before his alliance with his most powerful backer, Rwanda, started to fray. A little over a year after he took power, after Kabila had begun to enlist Hutu génocidaires to counter what he perceived as a Tutsi threat to his incipient rule, the alliance snapped. Half a dozen African armies and a score of rebel groups plunged Congo into five more years of war, during which millions died. 

When Mwangachuchu went home in 1998, the dynamics of eastern Congo were shifting once again. Anti-Kabila rebels supported by Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government had taken control of the East. No one in this ethnic cauldron is ever safe, but the latest realignment favored Congolese Tutsis like Mwangachuchu. He set about reclaiming his ancestral lands at Bibatama, thirty miles northwest of Goma. Mwangachuchu knew that the territory contained something still more precious than fertile pastures for grazing cattle—the rocks beneath were rich with coltan.5 

Investors from Congo’s old colonial master, Belgium, had mined the area around Mwangachuchu’s lands, but their joint venture with the government had collapsed in the mid-1990s. Invading Rwandan forces and their allies looted thousands of tons of coltan and cassiterite, the tin bearing ore, from the company’s stockpiles, UN investigators found. 6 When Mwangachuchu arrived home, artisanal miners around his mountain hometown were hacking away at the rock with picks and shovels. The cassiterite would fetch a few dollars per kilo. But far-off developments in global markets were about to spur the coltan trade—and pour cash into eastern Congo’s war. 

The boom in mobile phones as well as in the rest of consumer electronics and games consoles caused voracious demand for tantalum. The two biggest companies that processed tantalum, Cabot of the United States and H.C. Starck of Germany, foresaw prolonged high demand. They signed long-term contracts, locking in their supply of tantalum ores.7 That created a shortage on the open market and sparked a scramble to find new supply sources. In the course of 2000, prices for tantalum ores rose tenfold. Congo was ripe for the picking. 

Thousands of eastern Congolese rushed into coltan mining. Many exchanged a farmer’s machete for a miner’s pick. Militias press-ganged others into mining. Livestock had long been the East’s most prized commodity, but now, suddenly, it was coltan. In 1999 North Kivu officially exported five tons of coltan; in 2001 it exported ninety tons. Even after the flood of Congolese supply brought the world price back down, coltan remained more lucrative than other ores. 

Coltan was not the sole catalyst of the conflict—far from it. Congo was seething before the boom and would have seethed even if coltan had never  been found. But the surging coltan trade magnified eastern Congo’s minerals’ potential to sustain the myriad factions that were using the hostilities to make money. “Thanks to economic networks that had been established in 1998 and 1999 during the first years of the Congo war, minerals traders and military officials were perfectly placed to funnel [coltan] out of the country,” writes Nest.8 

Mwangachuchu started mining his land in 2001, employing about a thousand men. An amiable man with an oval face and soft features, he breaks bread with his workers and sometimes even works the mines himself, people who know him told me. Mwangachuchu Hizi International (MHI), the business he founded with his partner, a doctor from Baltimore named Robert Sussman, swiftly came to account for a large chunk of North Kivu’s coltan output. “We are proud of what we are doing in Congo,” Sussman said at the time. “We want the world to understand that if it’s done right, coltan can be good for this country.”9 But UN investigators and western campaigners were starting to draw attention to the role Congo’s mineral trade played in funding the war. The airline that had been transporting MHI’s ore to Europe severed ties with the company. “We don’t understand why they are doing this,” Mwangachuchu told a reporter. “The Congolese have a right to make business in their own country.”10 

Other foreign businesspeople were less concerned about doing business in a war zone, which is what eastern Congo remained even after the formal end of hostilities in 2003. Estimates I have heard of the proportion of Congolese mineral production that is smuggled out of the country range from 30 to 80 percent. Perhaps half of the coltan that for years Rwanda exported as its own was actually Congolese.11 

Militias and the Congolese army directly control some mining operations and extract taxes and protection money from others. Corrupt officials facilitate the trade. The comptoirs, or trading houses, of Goma on the border with Rwanda orchestrate the flow of both officially declared mineral exports and smuggled cargoes. Other illicit routes run directly from mines across the Rwandan and Ugandan borders. UN investigators have documented European and Asian companies purchasing pillaged Congolese minerals. Once the ores are out of the country, it is a simple step to refine them and then sell the gold, tin, or tantalum to manufacturers. The road may be circuitous, but it leads from the heart of Congo’s war to anywhere mobile phones and laptops can be found. 

In the absence of anything resembling a functioning state, an ever-shifting array of armed groups continues to profit from lawlessness, burrowing for minerals and preying on a population that, like Tantalus, is condemned to suffer in the midst of plenty. In 2007 Mwangachuchu fell out with Robert Sussman, the cofounder of his mining business, a dispute that would lead a Maryland court to order the Congolese to pay the American $2 million. Mwangachuchu pressed on alone. His lands went on yielding up their precious ore. And he began to cultivate a new partner: the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defense of the People), a militia that largely does the opposite of what its name suggests. 

The relentless conflict in eastern Congo has prevented the development of large-scale industrial mining there. Almost all mining is done by hand. The East’s minerals have fueled the war, but the value of its output is tiny compared with the immense mines to the south. 

Congo’s Katanga province, sandwiched between Angola and Zambia, holds about half of the world’s stocks of cobalt.12 The metal is mostly used to make the ultrastrong superalloys that are integral to turbines and jet engines. It is mined as a by-product of copper, a crucial ingredient of human civilization, from its first uses in ancient coins to the wiring in electricity networks. The African copperbelt stretches from northern Zambia into Katanga and holds some of the planet’s richest copper stocks. In Katanga vast whorls of red earth and rock have been cut into the forest, open pit mines that descend in steps like amphitheatres. 

Katanga has endured secessionist conflict and suffered heavy fighting during the war. But, lying much further from the border with Rwanda, the principal foreign protagonist in the rolling conflicts, Katanga has known more stability than the East. Mining multinationals from Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and China have operations in Katanga; the region’s mining output dwarfs the rest of Congo’s economy. Congo’s rulers have built a shadow state on the foundations of Katanga’s minerals, resembling the one that Angola’s Futungo has fashioned from crude oil. 

Augustin Katumba Mwanke grew up in Katanga idolizing the executives who ran Gécamines, the national copper-mining company. As Congo crumbled in the dying years of Mobutu’s rule, a combination of fierce intelligence, luck, and determination carried him to South Africa, then brimming with possibility after the end of apartheid. He worked for mining companies before landing a job at a subsidiary of HSBC. In April 1997, when Laurent Kabila’s forces captured Katanga on their advance across Congo, the bank grew nervous that the rebels might not honor a loan it had made to Gécamines. A delegation was dispatched to Congo for talks with the rebels. Katumba was added to the party in the hope that a Congolese face might help the bank’s cause.13 

“When they came I saw a young man who looked very bright,” Mawa panga Mwana Nanga, then the rebels’ finance chief, told me years later.14 An agronomist who had trained in Kentucky, Mawapanga was on the lookout for talented recruits as he prepared to inherit a ransacked treasury. He took a shine to Katumba. “I told him, ‘You should come back. The country needs people like you.’ We were just joking. I said, ‘I can give you a job, but I can’t pay you yet.’” The lighthearted exchange contained a serious offer. Mawapanga exhorted Katumba to have the bank second him to what was about to become Congo’s new government. Katumba craved influence but had foreseen a career in international business, not the chaos of Congolese government. Nonetheless, aged thirty-three, he headed home to take up Mawapanga’s invitation. His transformation into one of Africa’s most powerful men had begun. 

As the rebels struggled to start governing after deposing Mobutu, Katumba impressed as an adviser in the finance ministry. He had been back in Congo less than a year when his phone rang. “Hello, may I speak with Katumba?” said the voice on the line. 

“Yes, this is he.” 

“This is Kabila.” 

Katumba had a friend with the same name and asked him what he wanted. 

“No,” said the voice. “This is Laurent-Désiré Kabila.”15 

The president, a fellow Katangan, told Katumba he wanted to meet him. A few weeks later Katumba stood before the corpulent guerrilla at the presidential palace. Following some brisk questioning about the young man’s  background, the president said, “I want to name you governor of Katanga.” According to his memoir, a stunned Katumba protested that he was utterly unqualified for what was one of the most influential positions in Congolese politics. But he could hardly refuse. The appointment was made public that evening. “Katanga is as big as France,” Mawapanga, the finance minister, told his protégé. “If you can manage that, the sky’s the limit.” He might have added that Katumba was being handed the keys to one of the world’s greatest vaults of minerals. 

Kabila’s rebels-turned-rulers needed to generate money from Congo’s dilapidated mining industry for the twin purposes of resisting an invasion by their erstwhile Rwandan backers and making sure that they used what might prove a brief stint in power to bolster their personal finances. Oscar Mudiay, a senior civil servant in Kabila’s government, told me that the president received a minimum of $4 million each week delivered in suitcases by state-owned and private mining companies.16 Kabila’s government soon signed a flurry of mining and oil deals, with scant regard for due process. The regional coalition that had swept him to power had split into pro-Kabila and pro-Rwanda alliances, and Kabila needed to keep his foreign allies, principally Zimbabwe and Angola, sweet. One beneficiary of the deal-making was Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company controlled by the Futungo, with which the Congolese state formed a partnership.17 As governor of Katanga province, Katumba was perfectly placed to build his influence over the mining industry. “He was more intelligent than the others and got close to Gécamines,” Oscar Mudiay recalled. 

As he built a base for himself in Congo’s mining heartland, Katumba became a member of Kabila’s inner circle. He befriended the president’s son while they traveled together on sensitive diplomatic missions. Monosyllabic and withdrawn, Joseph Kabila had been thrown into the military when his father became the figurehead of the rebellion against Mobutu. He was prematurely promoted to general and, in name at least, appointed head of the army. In December 2000 Rwandan troops and anti-Kabila forces routed the Congolese army and its foreign allies at Pweto, Katumba’s hometown in Katanga. The Rwandans seized a valuable cache of arms, but there was another prize within their reach: Joseph Kabila was on the battlefield. As the Congolese army melted into frantic retreat and the high  command took to its heels, Katumba received a call from the president: “Kiddo, find Joseph, my son.”18 

Katumba raced to reach Joseph by phone and discovered he was alive and still free. Such were the straits of the government campaign that Katumba, according to his memoir, personally had to find fuel and take it to the airport for a plane to evacuate the president’s son.19 This was the moment that formed an unbreakable bond between Katumba and the younger Kabila. 

Four weeks later one of Laurent Kabila’s bodyguards, an easterner who had been among the cohort of child soldiers in Kabila’s rebel army, approached the president and shot him three times at close range, for reasons that have been the subject of competing conspiracy theories ever since. In disarray, his senior officials decided to create a dynasty on the spot and summoned Joseph to Kinshasa to inherit the presidency. Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, the former finance minister who had brought Katumba back to Congo, was involved in the tense efforts to hold the government together after the assassination. “Joseph was a general—he did not know politics,” Mawapanga told me. “So he called Katumba to come back and be his right-hand man and show him how to navigate the political waters.” 

In four years Katumba had gone from a junior post in a Johannesburg bank to the side of Congo’s new president. He was appointed minister of the presidency and state portfolio, in charge of state-owned companies. In 2002 UN investigators appointed to study the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources named him as one of the key figures in an “elite network” of Congolese and Zimbabwean officials, foreign businessmen, and organized criminals who were orchestrating the plunder of Congolese minerals under cover of war.20 “This network has transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the past three years with no compensation or benefit for the state treasury of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” the UN team wrote. 

When the UN investigators recommended Katumba be placed under UN sanctions, he was shuffled out of his official post in Kabila’s government—and moved into the shadow state. He became the leading exponent of a system that Africa Confidential, the most comprehensive publication in English on the continent’s affairs, encapsulated: “Exercising power, from the late President Mobutu Sese Seko to the Kabila dynasty, has relied on access to secret untraceable funds to reward supporters, buy elections and run vast patronage networks. This parallel state coexists with formal structures and their nominal commitment to transparency and the rule of law.”21 

I have heard people compare Katumba to Rasputin, Karl Rove, and the grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire. Diplomats rarely met him. In photographs his eyes look penetrating, his face set in a permanent semi frown of calculation. One foreigner who found himself in the same room as Katumba described an impressive man, shrewd and gentlemanly, with a fondness for his own jokes. “He never spoke much,” said Oscar Mudiay, the official who served under Laurent Kabila. “Just a glance.” 

Katumba was like an elder brother to the young president. “Joseph Kabila put his total faith in Katumba,” Olivier Kamitatu, an opposition politician who served for five years as planning minister in Kabila’s government, told me.22 “He was hugely intelligent. He knew how to run the political networks and the business networks. The state today is the property of certain individuals. Katumba’s work was to create a parallel state.” 

On October 15, 2004, the residents of the Katangan mining town of Kilwa discovered what it meant to fall foul of Katumba’s looting machine. The previous day Alain Kazadi Makalayi, a twenty-year-old fisherman with delusions of grandeur, had arrived in Kilwa at the head of half a dozen ramshackle separatists and proclaimed the independence of Katanga.23 His call to arms attracted fewer than a hundred young followers. Realizing that a rebellion that could not even organize a radio broadcast was unlikely to last long and that the national army could not be far off, most of Kilwa’s inhabitants ran away. 

The separatists posed a negligible threat, but they had dared to challenge the interests of the shadow state. Dikulushi, the copper mine that lay thirty miles outside the town, was linked to Katumba. 

Anvil Mining, a small Australian outfit, had won the rights to mine the area in 1998 and began producing copper in 2002. According to a subsequent inquiry by the Congolese Parliament, the company was granted a twenty-year exemption from paying any taxes whatsoever.24 Katumba was a founding board member of Anvil’s local subsidiary, and his name appeared on the minutes of three board meetings between 2001 and 2004.25 Bill Turner, Anvil’s chief executive, denied that Katumba held any shares in the company; he said Katumba sat on the board as the government’s representative. But Turner admitted to a reporter from Australia’s ABC television that, as well as a few thousand dollars in director’s fees, the company paid some $50,000 a year to rent a compound Katumba owned in Lubumbashi, Katanga’s capital, for its headquarters. 

After the young separatist convened a public meeting in Kilwa’s marketplace to proclaim his rebellion and declare that the days of Joseph Kabila and Katumba “pocketing money from the mines” were over, the president ordered the regional military commander to retake the town within forty-eight hours.26 Troops had orders to “shoot anything that moved,” according to a UN inquiry into what followed.27 

The soldiers arrived on Anvil Mining’s aircraft and made use of the company’s vehicles. They encountered scant resistance and suffered no casualties putting down the inept rebellion. Once the fighting was over they taught Kilwa a lesson. 

Soldiers went from house to house, dispensing vengeance. At least one hundred people were killed. Some were forced to kneel beside a mass grave before being executed one by one. Among the dead were both insurgents and civilians, including a teenager whose killers made off with his bicycle. Kazadi, the hapless separatist leader, was said to have died of his wounds in the hospital. Soldiers who ransacked homes and shops carried their loot away in Anvil vehicles, which were also used to transport corpses, according to the UN investigation, claims the company denied.28 

A decade later, in 2014, I asked Bill Turner about Anvil’s role in the Kilwa massacre. “Anvil were of course aware of the rebellion and the suppression of the rebellion in Kilwa in October 2004, having provided logistics to the DRC Military, under force of law,” he told me, declining to elaborate on what those logistics were. But Turner told me he had not been aware of “allegations of war crimes or atrocities” until an ABC reporter asked him about them in an interview seven months after the massacre. (He added that the interview was edited with the aim of “portraying Anvil and me  in the worst possible light.”) “There have been multiple government inquiries in a number of countries, including a detailed Australian Federal Police investigation in Australia into those allegations,” Turner continued in a letter responding to my questions. “None of those enquiries has found that there is any substance whatsoever to the allegations. In addition, there has been litigation instigated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Western Australia and Canada, which has at least touched on the matters raised by you. In none of those cases have there been findings against Anvil.”29 

The survivors’ representatives fought for years to hold those responsible for the Kilwa massacre to account, but they got nowhere. Katumba was untouchable. In 2009 a US diplomatic cable described him as “a kind of shady, even nefarious figure within Kabila’s inner circle, [who] is believed to manage much of Kabila’s personal fortune.”30 The cable was transmitting news that Katumba had stepped down from his latest formal position, heading Kabila’s majority in the national assembly. But it predicted— accurately—that his influence would remain. 

In 2006 and 2007 two rebel groups and the Congolese army fought for control over Edouard Mwangachuchu’s coltan mine at Bibatama.31 The group that won out was arguably the most formidable rebel force in eastern Congo—quite an accolade, given the ferocity of the fighting that continued to erupt regularly despite the formal end of the war in 2003. 

Known by its French acronym, CNDP, the Congress for the Defense of the People was the creation of Laurent Nkunda, a Tutsi renegade general and Seventh-Day Adventist pastor from North Kivu. Nkunda had fought with Rwanda against Laurent Kabila before joining the Congolese national army when it incorporated various warring factions under the 2003 peace deal. He rose to general before returning to the cause of rebellion—this time, his own. 

The hills and forests around Nkunda’s hometown in North Kivu became his fiefdom, as the forces at his command swelled to eight thousand men (and children).32 A student of psychology, for a time he outwitted everyone, navigating with cunning the treacherous terrain in which Rwanda and Kinshasa jostled for influence with UN peacekeepers, arms dealers, local politicians, and eastern Congo’s constellation of paramilitary groups. 

For all Nkunda’s rhetoric—he spoke to a Financial Times reporter in 2008 of “a cry for peace and freedom”—his operation was, in large measure and like many of its rivals, a money-making venture.33 Eastern Congo’s militias—not to mention the army itself—have many ways to bring in revenue, from taxing commercial traffic to ranching and trading in charcoal. But the mining trade is particularly lucrative and has the advantage of bringing in foreign currency that can buy arms. 

The business arrangements of eastern Congo’s clandestine mineral trade reveal something else, something that undercuts the crass notion that the primitive hatreds of African tribes is the sole driver of the conflict. The two most important militias, the CNDP and the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), are sworn enemies. The former’s stated reason to exist is to defend the Tutsis of eastern Congo from the latter, a cohort formed by the Hutu extremists who perpetrated the Rwandan genocide. Both also serve as proxies: Joseph Kabila has supported the FDLR to counter the influence that Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-led government in Rwanda exercises through the CNDP. 

But as one easterner who has worked in both mining and intelligence told me, “Formally the groups are all enemies. But when it comes to making money and mining, they cooperate pretty well. War changes, but business goes on. The actors change, but the system stays—the links between the armed groups and the mines. The conflict goes on because it has its own financing: the mines and the weapons. It has its own economy.”34 

On a Sunday afternoon in Goma I drank a beer beside a pool at a hotel with Colonel Olivier Hamuli. He is the spokesman of the Congolese armed forces and journalists regard him as one of the more accurate sources of information on the fighting, even if he avoids discussing the military’s own role in plunder and atrocities. An easterner, his convivial demeanor cannot mask the eyes of a man who has seen too much. When we met he was fielding call after call about clashes between Tutsi rebels and the army. The rebels had advanced to take strategic positions on the edge of Goma; the army and UN peacekeepers were preparing helicopter gunships for a counterattack. 

“The CNDP, the FDLR, they say they are fighting against bad governance. They are just mining. Even the FDLR, they are not trying to challenge the Rwandan government—they are here to mine. This is the problem of the war in the east,” the colonel said.35 “It’s a war of economic opportunity. It’s not just Rwanda that benefits; it’s businessmen in the United States, Australia too.” He brandished one of his incessantly buzzing mobile phones. “Smuggling goes on. Mobile phones are still being made. They need the raw materials one way or another.” 

According to the UN panel of experts that tries to keep track of the links between eastern Congo’s conflict and the mineral trade, after Nkunda won the battle for the territory that contained Mwangachuchu’s mining operations, the warlord permitted the businessman to retain control of his mines in return for a cut of the coltan.36 Mwangachuchu told the UN team he paid 20 cents per kilo of coltan exported from his mines at checkpoints he suspected were run by the CNDP.37 That levy alone would have channeled thousands of dollars a year into the militia’s war chest. Altogether eastern Congo’s militias are estimated to have raked in something to the tune of $185 million in revenues from the trade in coltan and other minerals in 2008.38 The UN team also reported Mwangachuchu’s excuse for funding the militia: he told the team he had “no choice but to accept the presence of CNDP and carry on working at Bibatama, as he needs money to pay $16,000 in taxes to the government.” 

To his supporters, Mwangachuchu is a well-meaning employer (of both Tutsis and other ethnicities) assailed by grasping militiamen. His supporters, none of whom wanted to be named when they spoke to me, described a legitimate businessman striving to introduce modern mining techniques in the face of turmoil and wrongheaded foreign interventions. Some well-informed Congolese observers are less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. One night in a Goma bar a senior army officer fumed with anger when I asked him about Mwangachuchu and other mining barons of North Kivu. He damned them all as war profiteers who preferred to pay a few dollars to rebel-run rackets than have a functioning state tax them properly. When I asked the easterner who has worked both on mining policy and in Congolese intelligence about Mwangachuchu’s claim that he had been forcibly taxed by the CNDP, he shot back, “It’s not a question of taxes. Mwangachuchu and the armed groups are the same thing.” 

It is hard to see how Mwangachuchu could have established himself as a leading Tutsi businessman in the East without becoming intertwined with the armed groups. As well as seeking prosperity, Tutsis in eastern Congo have faced near-constant threats to their survival, most terrifyingly from the Rwandan Hutu génocidaires who roam the hills. 

In 2011 Mwangachuchu stood as a candidate for CNDP’s political wing in the national assembly—and its foot soldiers helped guarantee his victory. They had been absorbed into the lawless ranks of Congo’s army under a shaky peace deal but retained their mining rackets and their loyalties.39 “The CNDP guys used every trick in the book to make sure he got through,” said a foreign election observer who watched former CNDP rebels filling out ballot papers for Mwangachuchu after the polls had closed.40 Ex-CNDP fighters in the national army were observed brazenly intimidating voters in North Kivu, some of the most egregious abuses in a deeply flawed national election that secured Kabila a fresh term.41 According to a report to the Security Council by a UN group of experts, to ensure the support of the CNDP’s fighters, Mwangachuchu had paid off Bosco Ntaganda. Known as “The Terminator,” Ntaganda had replaced the deposed Laurent Nkunda three years earlier as the CNDP boss and brought his boys into the army even though he was wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers, and ethnic persecution.42 Despite overwhelming evidence of foul play and months of legal wrangling, Mwangachuchu’s election stood. Even before his victory was secure, Ntaganda named him president of the CNDP’s political party. 

Mwangachuchu’s leadership was short lived. A few months after the 2011 election Kabila’s government sought to strengthen its writ in the East by relocating the former CNDP militiamen who had been brought into the national army to postings elsewhere in the country, far from the East’s coltan, gold, and tin mines. But the militiamen were not about to give that up without a fight. Several hundred mutinied under a new acronym, M23, short for March 23, the date of the 2009 deal that had brought them into the army. Rwanda, deeply involved in both eastern Congo’s military and mining networks, again provided covert support to the mainly Tutsi rebels as they advanced on Goma.43 

In early May 2012 General James Kabarebe, the redoubtable Rwandan defense minister who had masterminded its military campaigns in Congo and surreptitiously commanded M23, called Mwangachuchu. He ordered him to support the rebels and pull the CNDP political party out of its alliance with Kabila.44 Mwangachuchu refused. Perhaps he feared that crossing Kabila would imperil his mining interests; perhaps he sensed that the new rebellion was doomed. A furious Kabarebe told Mwangachuchu that “a lightning bolt will strike you.” Within days he had been ousted as president of the CNDP’s political party. 

But Mwangachuchu had chosen wisely. Western powers that had long turned a blind eye to Rwanda’s meddling in Congo ran out of patience and suspended aid. Bosco Ntaganda, the Tutsi warlord who had joined the mutiny, found himself under such mortal threat that he chose to take his chances in The Hague and turned himself in at the US embassy in Rwanda, from where he was sent to face justice at the International Criminal Court. At negotiations in Uganda between Kabila’s government and the M23 rebels, Mwangachuchu was part of the government delegation. The talks came to little, and in late 2013 Congolese forces, backed by a new UN force with a mandate to smash the rebel groups, routed the M23 rebels. 

I asked Mwangachuchu to give me his own account. He declined. When I e-mailed him a list of questions, it was his lawyer who replied. Mwangachuchu, the lawyer wrote, “reminds you that there is a war on in this part of the country and he cannot afford at this stage to answer your questions.” Mwangachuchu can claim to have played peacemaker—but only when it suits him. “He’s not a fighter; he’s a businessman,” a former minister in Kabila’s government told me. “His loyalties are not so strong—except to his business.” 

Our two-jeep convoy slowed as it approached a roadblock deep in the tropical forests of one of eastern Congo’s national parks. Manning the roadblock were soldiers from the Congolese army, theoretically the institution that should safeguard the state’s monopoly on the use of force but, in practice, chiefly just another predator on civilians. As my Congolese companions negotiated nervously with the soldiers, I stepped away to take advantage of a break in a very long drive and relieve myself, only to sense someone rushing toward me. Hurriedly zipping up my fly, I turned to see a  fast-approaching soldier brandishing his AK47. With a voice that signified a grave transgression, he declared, “It is forbidden to piss in the park.” Human urine, the soldier asserted, posed a threat to eastern Congo’s gorillas. I thought it best not to retort that the poor creatures had been poached close to extinction by, among others, the army nor that the park attracted far more militiamen than gorilla-watching tourists. 

My crime, it transpired, carried a financial penalty. My companions took the soldier aside, and the matter was settled. Perhaps they talked him down, using the presence of a foreign journalist as leverage. Perhaps they slipped him a few dollars. As we drove away it occurred to me that we had witnessed the Congolese state in microcosm. The soldier was following the example set by Kabila, Katumba, Mwangachuchu, and Nkunda: capture a piece of territory, be it a remote intersection of potholed road, a vast copper concession, or the presidency itself; protect your claim with a gun, a threat, a semblance of law, or a shibboleth; and extract rent from it. The political economy of the roadblock has taken hold. The more the state crumbles, the greater the need for each individual to make ends meet however they can; the greater the looting, the more the authority of the state withers. 

Leaving the roadblock behind, we bounced along the pitted tracks that lead into the interior of South Kivu province. It was late 2010, and a joint offensive against Hutu rebels by Congolese and Rwandan forces and their allied militias had driven masses of civilians from their farmsteads. Kwashiorkor, or severe acute malnutrition in children, was rife. 

The lone hospital in Bunyakiri serves 160,000 people. It has no ambulance and no electricity, making it almost impossible after nightfall to find a vein for an injection. The rusting metal of its roof is scarcely less rickety than the surrounding mud huts. When I visited, medicine was in short supply, the army having recently ransacked the hospital. There was no mobile phone reception, an irony in a part of the world whose tantalum is crucial in making the devices. 

The hospital’s pediatric ward had fourteen beds. At least two mothers sat on each, cradling their babies. On one, Bora Sifa regarded her surroundings warily. Two years earlier a raiding party from the FDLR, the militia formed by the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, had descended on her village in search of loot to supplement the income from their mining operations. The raiders ordered Bora’s husband to gather up what they wanted. “They forced him to carry all the things away into the forest,” Bora told me. “Then they killed him.” 

Bora fled and a stranger in another village took her in, allowing her and her children to live in an outhouse. Now twenty, she made about a dollar a day helping to cultivate cassava, a root crop that fills empty bellies but has little nutritional value. Five days ago she had brought her son, Chance, to the hospital. “He wasn’t growing,” Bora said. “I wasn’t making enough milk.” Like many malnourished children, Chance’s features had aged prematurely. His eyes were sunken, his hair receding. 

At any given moment since the start of Congo’s great war in 1998, between 1 million and 3.5 million Congolese have been adrift like Bora. The vast majority are in the East, driven from mining areas or the shifting frontlines of multiple interwoven conflicts. In 2013 2.6 million of Congo’s 66 million people were “internally displaced,” as refugees who have remained in their country are known in the jargon of human catastrophe, making up one in ten of the worldwide tally.45 Many end up in flimsy bivouacs fashioned from tarpaulins bearing the brands of assorted relief agencies; others appeal to the solidarity of their fellow Congolese, which persists despite the myriad fissures that war, desperation, and ethnicity have opened between them. That solidarity can only do so much in a country where twothirds lack sufficient food. Uprooted, Congo’s wandering millions starve. 

With the help of the hospital’s tireless doctor and a French charity, Chance was recovering.46 Few others shared his fortune. Further up the road I visited a hilltop clinic beside a school in the town of Hombo Sud. One by one, dozens of emaciated children were being dangled from weighing scales and checked for telltale signs of severe malnutrition: oedema (a buildup of fluids in the legs) and arms with a circumference of less than 10.5 centimeters. 

Anna Rebecca Susa, a bundle of spindles in a pink skirt emblazoned with the word “Princess,” was dangerously underweight. The special measuring tape showed red when a medic pulled it tight round her arm. Her belly was swollen beneath fleshless ribs, her hair reduced to a faint frizz. At five, she could not understand what was happening to her, but her big eyes were full of anxiety, as though she could sense that her body was failing.  She could not keep down a sachet of the peanut paste that can do wonders for malnourished children and was sent home with more in the hope her stomach would settle. Her father, Lavie, invited me back to his home, an outhouse belonging to a distant relative where Lavie, his wife, and their four children had lived since they fled rebel attacks on their home village two years previously. 

The signature falsetto guitar of Congolese music drifted over the jagged rooftops of the tiny metal shacks sprayed across the slopes. Lavie’s wife, whose wedding ring he had fashioned from a plastic bottle top, was out foraging for leaves. Anna fell asleep on the shack’s lone bed. Her younger brother, Espoir, tottered around, oblivious to his sister’s plight. 

A few weeks later I got in touch with the clinic’s medics to ask after Anna. When she had kept throwing up the peanut paste, the French charity had driven her to the hospital at Bunyakiri. By then there was little anyone could do. Her immune system destroyed by malnutrition, she died of an infection. 

The heavens opened the day they buried Augustin Katumba Mwanke. The Congolese establishment sheltered under marquees in Kinshasa before the coffin that sported an enormous floral garland.47 In a black suit and black shirt Joseph Kabila arrived amid a phalanx of bodyguards maneuvering to keep an umbrella over his head. It was a rare public appearance for a reclusive president said to have spent his early years in office in the company of video games. His face was expressionless. Barely two months had passed since he had rigged his way to victory in the presidential election, securing a second five-year term. Now the mastermind behind both his power and his wealth was gone. The previous day, February 12, 2012, the American pilot of the jet carrying a group of Kabila’s senior officials to Bukavu by Lake Kivu had misjudged the landing. Katumba’s last moments came as the aircraft veered off the runway and smashed into a grassy embankment. He was forty-eight. 

One other guest at the funeral stood out. He was the lone white face in the front row. Kabila clasped his hand. The burly, bearded man in a yarmulke, the Jewish skullcap, was Dan Gertler. He was the all-important intersection between the shadow state that controlled access to Congo’s minerals and the multinational mining companies that coveted them. 

The grandson of one of the founders of Israel’s diamond exchange, in his early twenties Gertler set forth to seek his own fortune. He went to Angola, then still deep in civil war and a rich source of diamonds. But another Israeli, Lev Leviev, had already staked a strong claim there. Gertler arrived in Congo in 1997, days after Laurent Kabila had overthrown Mobutu. An ultra-orthodox Jew, he was introduced by a rabbi to Joseph Kabila, newly installed as the head of the Congolese army.48 The younger Kabila and Gertler had much in common. Each stood in the shadow of his elders, carrying a heavy burden on young shoulders into the cauldron of Congolese warfare and politics. They became firm friends. 

Gertler soon discovered the value of his friendship with the president’s son. Kabila Sr. was in urgent need of funds to arm his forces against Rwandan and Ugandan invaders and to butter up his allies for the fight.49 When Joseph took his new friend to meet his father, the president told the young Israeli that if he could raise $20 million without delay, he could have a monopoly to buy every diamond mined in Congo. Gertler cobbled together the cash and was granted the monopoly. 

Not for the last time, an arrangement that suited Gertler and the Kabila clan hardly served the interests of the Congolese people. “It wasn’t a good deal for us,” Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, then the finance minister, told me. “We should have opened the market to the highest bidder.”50 UN investigators declared that Gertler’s diamond monopoly had been a “nightmare” for Congo’s government and a “disaster” for the local diamond trade, encouraging smuggling and costing the treasury tax revenue.51 It could not last. After Joseph Kabila succeeded his assassinated father in 2001, the monopoly was canceled under pressure from foreign donors.52 

Gertler was not deterred. He reestablished a commanding position in the Congolese diamond trade by arranging to buy stones from the state owned diamond miner and began to turn his attention to the far bigger prize: the copper and cobalt of Katanga, where production and prices would rise dramatically as Asian demand for base metals soared. His most important asset—his bond with the new president—was intact. “Gertler showed that he could help the family and, in return, they said, ‘We can  do business with you,’” a diplomat who spent years watching Gertler’s exploits in Congo told me. “Kabila can only keep himself in power with the help of people like Gertler: it’s like an insurance mechanism—someone who can get you money and stuff when you need it.” 

Over the years that followed, Gertler cultivated Katumba too, even inviting him to a party on a yacht in the Red Sea that included a performance by Uri Geller, the Israeli illusionist and self-proclaimed psychic.53 In a reverie of gratitude to Gertler, in the final pages of his posthumously published memoir Katumba wrote that “in spite of all our seeming differences, I am proud to be the brother you never had.”54 

The trio of Kabila, Katumba, and Gertler was unassailable. “It’s like an exclusive golf club,” one of Kabila’s former ministers told me. “If you go and say, ‘The founders are cheating,’ they’re going to say: ‘And who the hell are you?’”55 Gertler’s role in this exclusive club was manifold. “It’s an amalgam—business, political assistance, finance,” said Olivier Kamitatu, who became an opposition legislator after his five-year stint as Kabila’s planning minister.56 Gertler’s particular contribution was to build a tangled corporate web through which companies linked to him have made sensational profits through sell-offs of some of Congo’s most valuable mining assets. “The line between the interests of the state and the personal interests of the president is not clear,” Kamitatu told me. “That is the presence of Gertler.” 

Since he first rode to Laurent Kabila’s rescue with $20 million to fund the war effort, Gertler has proved himself invaluable to Congo’s rulers. Katumba wrote in his memoir that Gertler’s “inexhaustible generosity, and the extreme efficiency of his assistance, have been decisive for us in the most crucial moments.”57 Deals in which he was involved are said to have helped finance Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election campaign.58 Kamitatu told me that Gertler had helped Kabila win that election and said he had also come up with cash for the military campaign against Laurent Nkunda’s rebels in the East. I asked Gertler’s representatives whether he had assisted Kabila at these moments and during the 2011 elections. They did not respond. Gertler has, however, denied that he has underpaid for Congolese mining assets. “The lies are screaming to the heavens,” he told a reporter from Bloomberg in 2012.59 

Kamitatu, who is the son of one of Congo’s independence leaders and trained in business before a political career that began as a senior figure a rebel group during the war, sees the shadow state as the root of his nation’s failure to escape poverty. “You can’t develop the country through parallel institutions. Every infrastructure project you undertake is not done through a strategic vision but with a view to the personal financial results,” he told me as we sat at his house in Kinshasa in 2013. Politics and private business have fused, Kamitatu believed. Winning a presidential election costs tens of millions of dollars, and the only people with that kind of money are the foreign mining houses. “I am extremely worried about a political system where the voters are starving and the politicians buy votes with money from natural resource companies,” Kamitatu said. “Is that democracy?” 

Dan Gertler’s Congolese mining deals have made him a billionaire. Many of the transactions in which he has played a part are fiendishly complicated, involving multiple interlinked sales conducted through offshore vehicles registered in tax havens where all but the most basic company information is secret. Nonetheless, a pattern emerges. A copper or cobalt mine owned by the Congolese state or rights to a virgin deposit are sold, sometimes in complete secrecy, to a company controlled by or linked to Gertler’s offshore network for a price far below what it is worth. Then all or part of that asset is sold at a profit to a big foreign mining company, among them some of the biggest groups on the London Stock Exchange. 

Gertler did not invent complexity in mining deals. Webs of subsidiaries and offshore holding companies are common in the resource industries, either to dodge taxation or to shield the beneficiaries from scrutiny. But even by the industry’s bewildering standards, the structure of Gertler’s Congo deals is labyrinthine. The sale of SMKK was typical.60 

SMKK was founded in 1999 as a joint venture between Gécamines, Congo’s state-owned mining company, and a small mining company from Canada.61 SMKK held rights to a tract of land in the heart of the copper belt. It sits beside some of the planet’s most prodigious copper mines, making it a fair bet that the area the company’s permits cover contains plentiful ore. Indeed, Gécamines had mined the site in the 1980s before  51 Mobutu’s looting drove the company into collapse.62 After a string of complicated transactions beginning in November 2007, involving a former England cricketer, a white crony of Robert Mugabe, and assorted offshore vehicles, 50 percent of SMKK ended up in the hands of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), whose oligarch owners had raised a few eyebrows in the City of London in 2007 when they obtained a London Stock Exchange listing for a company they had built from privatized mines in Kazakhstan.63 The Congolese state, through Gécamines, still owned the remaining 50 percent of SMKK. 

Toward the end of 2009 ENRC bought an option, only made public months later, to purchase the 50 percent it did not already own. The strange thing was that ENRC did not buy that option from the owner of the stake, state-owned Gécamines, but from a hitherto unknown company called Emerald Star Enterprises Limited.64 Emerald Star was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, one of the most popular secrecy jurisdictions, shortly before it struck this agreement with ENRC, which suggests that it was set up for that specific purpose.65 There is nothing in Emerald Star’s registration documents to show who owns it. But other documents related to the deal would later reveal the identity of its principal owner, Dan Gertler’s family trust.66 

At this stage all Gertler had was a deal to sell to ENRC a stake in SMKK that he did not yet own. That was soon rectified. On February 1, 2010, Gertler’s Emerald Star signed an agreement with Gécamines to buy the Congolese state’s 50 percent share in SMKK for $15 million.67 ENRC duly exercised its option to buy the stake by buying Emerald Star for another $50 million on top of the $25 million it had paid for the option. The interwoven deals were done and dusted by June 2010.68 All the corporate chicanery masked a simple fact: the Congolese state had sold rights to a juicy copper prospect for $15 million to a private company, which immediately sold the same rights on for $75 million—a $60 million loss for the state and a $60 million profit for Gertler. 

The Congolese people were not the only losers in the SMKK deal. ENRC’s would seem to have suffered too. When it bought the first 50 percent of SMKK, ENRC had also acquired a right of first refusal should Gécamines decide to sell the other half.69 That meant that ENRC could have bought the stake when it was offered to Dan Gertler’s company for $15 million. Instead, it paid $75 million a few months later, once the stake had first passed to Gertler’s offshore vehicle. ENRC has not disclosed the terms of its right of first refusal and did not reply to my questions about it. Perhaps there was some stipulation in it that meant buying the stake directly from Gécamines would have been more expensive for ENRC than buying it via Gertler. But based on the details that have emerged, it is hard to see how the oligarch founders of ENRC thought the SMKK maneuver was in the best interests of the rest of the investors who had bought shares in the company when it floated in London. 

ENRC was a member of the FTSE 100, the prestigious list of the UK’s biggest listed companies, in which pension funds invest savers’ money. Investors who bought shares when ENRC listed some of its stock in December 2007 paid £5.40 a share, raising £1.4 billion for the company. Over the six years that followed, ENRC’s boardroom was a scene of unceasing turbulence, as the oligarch founders continued to exert their influence over a company that was supposedly subject to British governance rules for listed corporations.70 ENRC snapped up assets in Africa, including SMKK, and struck other deals with Gertler in Congo. The Serious Fraud Office was in the middle of an investigation (still active at the time of writing) into ENRC’s activities in Africa and Kazakhstan—and its share price was sliding precipitously downward—when the oligarchs announced that they planned, with the help of the Kazakh government, to buy back the stock they had listed in London, thereby taking the company private again.71 The offer was valued at £2.28 a share—less than half of what investors who bought in at the start had paid for them.72 

If some British pension funds and stock-market dabblers felt burned by their investments in ENRC, their losses were relatively easy to bear compared with those that Gertler’s sweetheart deals have inflicted on Congo. The best estimate, calculated by Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel, puts the losses to the Congolese state from SMKK and four other such deals at $1.36 billion between 2010 and 2012.73 Based on that estimate, Congo lost more money from these deals alone than it received in humanitarian aid over the same period.74 So porous is Congo’s treasury that there is no guarantee that, had they ended up there, these revenues would have been spent on schools and hospitals and other worthwhile endeavors; indeed, government income from resource rent has a tendency to add to misrule, absolving rulers of the need to convince electorates to pay taxes. But no state can fulfill its basic duties if it is broke. Between 2007 and 2012 just 2.5 percent of the $41 billion that the mining industry generated in Congo flowed into the country’s meager budget.75 Meanwhile, the shadow state flourishes. 

Since at least 1885, when Congo became the personal possession of Belgium’s King Leopold II, outsiders have been complicit in the plunder of Congo’s natural wealth. King Leopold turned the country into a commercial enterprise, producing first ivory then rubber at the cost of millions of Congolese lives. In 1908 Leopold yielded personal ownership of Congo to the Belgian state, which, keen to retain influence over the mineral seams of Katanga following independence in 1960, encouraged the region’s secessionists, helping to bring down the liberation leader Patrice Lumumba in a CIA-sponsored coup that ushered in Mobutu, who became one of the century’s most rapacious kleptocrats.76 Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush welcomed him warmly to Washington. Only once his usefulness expired after the end of the Cold War did the United States abandon Mobutu to flee from Laurent Kabila’s advancing rebels. 

In the era of globalization the foreign protagonists in Congo’s looting machine are not monarchs or imperial states but rather tycoons and multinationals. As well as the likes of Dan Gertler, there are the companies that do business with him. ENRC is one. Another is Glencore, the giant, secretive commodity trading house based in the Swiss town of Zug, which listed its shares on the London Stock Exchange in 2013, immediately becoming one of the UK’s biggest listed companies. In 2010 and 2011 Glencore was involved in transactions in which, according to calculations by Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel, the Congolese state sold mining assets to companies connected to Gertler for hundreds of millions of dollars less than they were worth.77 (Both ENRC and Glencore insist there has been nothing improper in their Congolese dealings.78) 

From multibillion-dollar copper deals in Katanga to smuggling rackets shifting coltan out of the East, Congo’s looting machine extends from the locals who control access to the mining areas, via middlemen to traders,  global markets, and consumers. During the war UN investigators described companies trading minerals as “the engine of the conflict.”79 A senior Congolese army officer remembered Viktor Bout, a notorious KGB agent–turned–arms dealer who was implicated in the illicit coltan trade— and whose exploits inspired the 2005 film Lord of War—dropping in to do business.80 “He did terrible things here,” the officer told me.81 The trade in minerals from eastern Congo spans the globe. In 2012, according to official records, North Kivu’s declared exports of raw minerals went to Dubai, China, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Panama, and Singapore. 

When Wall Street nearly imploded in 2008, triggering economic havoc far beyond Manhattan, the world was reminded of the extent of the damage that a complex, cross-border network combining financial, economic, and political power can do. The reforming legislation in the aftermath of the crisis dealt mostly with the financial quackery that had grown rife in US banks. But toward the end of the 848-page Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was an item that had nothing to do with subprime mortgages or liquidity ratios. “It is the sense of Congress that the exploitation and trade of conflict minerals originating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is helping to finance conflict characterized by extreme levels of violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo,” read a clause in the Act that responded to years of pressure from campaigners. In the future companies using coltan and other resources from Congo in their products would have to submit to US regulators a report on their supply chain, signed off by an independent auditor, demonstrating that they were not funding armed groups. Some six thousand companies would be affected, among them Apple, Ford, and Boeing.82 

Few could fault the sentiment. But the legislation was drafted in Congress, not Congo. It backfired. For one thing, the definition of “armed groups” left out the Congolese army, which has been responsible for looting and wanton violence. Then there was the practical difficulty of tracking supply chains in a war zone. When the Dodd-Frank Act passed, many buyers of Congolese minerals simply took their business elsewhere, re-inforcing a temporary ban on mineral exports imposed by Joseph Kabila in response to pressure to curtail the turmoil in the East. 

A score of “conflict-free” certification schemes have sprung up, some connected to Dodd-Frank, some to Congolese initiatives, and some to industry efforts to wipe the stigma from their products. In April 2013 an  independent German auditor who had spent five days at Edouard Mwangachuchu’s coltan mines concluded that “with the evidence presented there was no indication that there are armed groups involved in mining.”83 The bigger militias had pulled back from Mwangachuchu’s corner of North Kivu; M23, the most threatening armed group of the day, was camped close to the Ugandan border, away from the main mining areas. 

I wanted to see for myself whether the link between eastern Congo’s minerals and its conflict was loosening. I asked to visit Mwangachuchu’s mines. He was out of town, and his company declined to grant me access. But I knew that a cooperative of informal miners was also mining the area, the subject of years of dispute with Mwangachuchu. On the three-hour drive from Goma we passed a settlement nestled in a bend in a valley that had served as the base for Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP rebels. Further along was a camp for refugees displaced by the M23 conflict. At the metal barriers marking the entrance to each village, young men flagged us down and suggested they might be due payment. Children, no older than five, had imitated their elders and crafted a makeshift roadblock of rocks and half a yellow water–canteen. They scampered from the road as approaching vehicles failed to slow. 

Another refugee camp marked the start of Rubaya, the mining town at the foot of the hills that Mwangachuchu and the informal miners exploit. Toddlers with bloated bellies, the signature of malnutrition, tottered at the road’s verge. The town itself boasted more robust dwellings than the makeshift tents of the displaced. Mining money had even allowed the construction of a few sturdy wooden houses. Rows of cassava tubers lay whitening in the sun. The whole town sounded as though it were wailing, so numerous were its infants, a chorus pierced by the occasional squawk of a cockerel. A tattered Congolese flag flapped from a skinny tree trunk. 

After an hour waiting to pay our respects to the town administrator— during which, a local activist whispered in my ear, the mining bosses were checking that there were not too many children at work for their visitor to see—my Congolese companions and I began our ascent to the summit. Red dust devils swirled around us as we climbed. A local man who worked to get children out of the mines pointed across a valley to the village where he had been one of the few survivors of a revenge massacre of Hutus by Rwandan invaders in 1997. 

Porters with white sacks on their heads cascaded down the unpaved paths from the peak, throwing up clouds of red-brown dust. Each sack contained up to fifty-five pounds of rock hewn from the mountain. The porters’ haste was a matter of economics: they were paid 1,000 Congolese francs per trip (about $1) and had to wash and sift their cargo in the stream at the bottom before it began the long trip toward the border or the buying houses of Goma. 

Most of the incipient certification schemes for Congolese minerals work by tagging sacks of ore as they emerge from the mine to certify their provenance, imitating the Kimberley Process, which was designed to stem the flow of “blood diamonds.” The idea is to prevent belligerents getting around embargoes by passing off their minerals as originating from another mine or smuggling them across borders to allow Congolese coltan to be branded as Rwandan or Angolan diamonds as Zambian. But on this hillside there was not a tag in sight. One local, a peace campaigner who had come along for the climb and who kept his distance from the mining bosses leading the ascent, told me that some of the coltan extracted here was crossing the nearby border into Uganda clandestinely. That took it right through the territory of M23 rebels. 

The slope grew steeper. The earth underfoot gave way like a sand dune. Finally a peak of jagged rock emerged, a giant fossilized sponge of warrens that the miners had dug by hand. About two thousand miners, all in Wellington boots, many bearing spades and picks, swarmed among the pits and trenches, some delving as deep as fifty feet into the ground with only rudimentary props to keep the sides from burying them alive. Some looked decidedly younger than eighteen. One was clearly baffled by the white skinned visitor whose hair was longer than the standard Congolese buzz cut. “He has the voice of a man,” the young miner intoned with consternation to one of my companions, “but the hair of a woman.” 

On the next hill over we could make out Mwangachuchu’s mine. All this territory lay under his concession, but the informal miners had enough political clout to carry on regardless of his protests, in part thanks to ethnic maneuvering by the cooperative’s Hutu leadership against the Tutsi Mwangachuchu. The cooperative had resisted Mwangachuchu’s repeated attempts to turf them off his land, challenging the validity of his claim. Mwangachuchu has countered by trying to oblige the informal miners to sell all their production through his company, without which it would be impossible for him to prove that minerals from the concession were not funding militias. 

The chief miner, Bazinga Kabano, a well-dressed man with a long walking cane and a penchant for bellowing at his subordinates, told me that when the CNDP controlled the area the miners’ association used to pay the rebels a $50 fee to be allowed to dig. But he was keen to paint his industry not as an engine of war but as a path to betterment. He explained that some of the miners graduated to be négociants, the intermediaries who buy coltan at the mine and sell it on to the comptoirs that export it. Surveying the teeming hilltop, he declared, “We are helping them to live their dreams.” 

I wandered off to talk to some miners out of earshot of the boss. Ka fanya Salongo bore a passing resemblance to a meerkat as his blinking head popped out of a hole in the ground. He was short, slim, and strong, ideal for a human burrower. He churned out one hundred sacks worth of rock a day, and that brought in $9. From that he had to find the $25 each miner must pay the bosses every month for the privilege of digging. “It’s not enough for the family,” he told me. “I can afford some food and some medicine, but that’s it.” At thirty-two, he had a wife and two sons. He laughed in the face of danger. “Yeah, it looks dangerous, but we know how to construct the shafts, so it’s fine.” 

It is easy to scoff at the boss’s notion that these miners are digging toward their dreams. The work is grueling and perilous. The official statistics recorded twenty deaths in mining accidents in North Kivu in 2012, six of them at an adjacent mine worked by the cooperative. The authorities noted that it is “very possible” that not all deaths were reported. But by local standards the miners’ wages amount to big bucks. Some splash their pay on booze and hookers; some build better houses. 

Kabila’s mining ban and the boycott prompted by the Dodd-Frank Act pitched thousands of eastern Congolese miners out of work. The World Bank has estimated that 16 percent of Congo’s population is directly or indirectly engaged in informal mining, which accounts for all but a fraction of the industry as measured by employment;84 in North Kivu in 2006  mining revenue provided an estimated two-thirds of state income.85 But revenues to the provincial government’s coffers fell by three-quarters in the four years before 2012, in part because of what officials called the “global criminalization of the mining sector” of eastern Congo. The state’s loss is the smugglers’ gain: when the official routes are closed, the clandestine trade picks up the slack. 

By the middle of 2013 Kabila’s ban had been partially relaxed, and previously blacklisted comptoirs in Goma had reopened. A dozen mines in North Kivu that the government deemed to be unconnected to armed groups had been “green-lighted” to export. But Emmanuel Ndimubanzi, the head of North Kivu’s mining division, told me that not a single mine was tagging its output so that buyers could identify the mine at which it had originated. “Tagging is very expensive,” he said. “We don’t have the partners to pay for it.” In what might have been a line from Catch-22, he added, “Certification can only happen with better security.” 

Regional initiatives are increasingly tracking shipments of coltan and other ores, even if North Kivu is lagging behind. Some campaigners have welcomed what appears to be a significant reduction in the documented connections between militias and mining sites as a result of certification efforts and a UN-backed offensive against the armed groups.86 Gradually Western-based electronics groups are drawing up lists of approved smelters that can demonstrate that their metals come from mines that do not benefit Congolese militias, although the campaign group Global Witness warned in 2014 that the first supply-chain reports, which US companies buying Congolese minerals are now required to submit to regulators, “lack substance.”87 The German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources has developed “fingerprinting” technology that can trace a shipment of ore back to the mine from which it was extracted. This technology could, if comprehensively applied, prevent the entry into the international market of minerals from militia-controlled mines, provided that it were matched with an intelligence-gathering program to keep tabs on all the militias’ mining operations. 

It appears unlikely that the certification schemes will ever reliably cover the whole of eastern Congo’s mining trade. Clean miners have been squeezed, as the retreat of Western buyers has let Chinese comptoirs gain a  near-monopoly on Congolese coltan, allowing them to dictate prices. The efforts to impose some control on the mineral trade might trim the income of the armed groups, but it does so at the cost of weakening the already precarious livelihoods of eastern Congo’s diggers and porters and their dependents. In a land ruled by the law of the roadblock, such initiatives can look quixotic. As Aloys Tegera of Goma’s Pole Institute, one of eastern Congo’s most astute commentators, writes, “Without a Congolese state capable of playing its role in controlling and running affairs, how can the minerals of Kivu be decriminalised?”88 

In the run-up to the 2011 elections and during the months that followed, the SMKK transactions and other similar ones effectively transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from the state to a close personal friend of a president. Dan Gertler has doubled as an emissary for the president, conducting diplomatic missions to Washington and Rwanda. “The truth is, during our very difficult times, there were investors who came and left and others who braved the hurricane,” Kabila has said of Gertler.89 “He’s one of those.” Kabila might have added that some of those who left did so when their assets were confiscated—and, in some cases, handed to Gertler.90 

Gertler maintains that, far from being a predator, he is among Congo’s greatest benefactors. He and his representatives point out, with some justification, that unlike the most egregious asset-flippers, who do nothing beyond using bribes and connections to win mining rights before selling them on, Gertler’s operations in Congo actually produce minerals, and lots of them. His company, the Fleurette Group, says it has invested $1.5 billion “in the acquisition and development of mining and other assets in the DRC,” that it supports twenty thousand Congolese jobs, and that it ranks among the country’s biggest taxpayers and philanthropists.91 Gertler himself has said his work in Congo is worthy of a Nobel Prize.92 

Katumba’s death sent a tremor through Kabila’s regime. Would-be investors whose only contract was an understanding they had reached with Katumba evaporated after the plane crash. But the president and Gert ler, brothers in spirit, have maintained the shadow government that Katumba helped to construct. Gertler has branched out into oil, prospecting promising new sites at Lake Albert. As for Kabila, he must now decide whether to run in the next elections, due in 2016. To do so he would need to induce the national assembly to change the constitution and remove the two-term limit for presidents, then conduct what one election monitor at the 2011 polls told me would need to be “a huge rigging operation” to overcome the electorate’s outrage. To pull off such an expensive task, Kabila would need to ratchet up the looting machine once again.

next-80s

Incubators of Poverty

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/10/part-2-looting-machine-warlords.html

notes

Introduction: 

A Curse of Riches 

1. The name was coined by researchers working for a US congressional commission set up to study China and its expanding role in the world. It was first used in Lee Levkowitz, Marta McLellan Ross, and J. R. Warner, “The 88 Queensway Group: A Case Study in Chinese Investors’ Operations in Angola and Beyond,” US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, July 10, 2009, http:// china.usc.edu/App_Images/The_88_Queensway_Group.pdf. The people and companies that form the Queensway Group do not use the term themselves, and the term does not connote a formal business but rather is an informal shorthand for a corporate network. 

2. These commodity prices are calculated with World Bank data that convert the nominal price for each year into their value in 2010 dollars. (Global Economic Monitor (GEM) Commodities, World Bank, http://databank.worldbank .org/data/views/variableselection/selectvariables.aspx?source=global-economic -monitor-(gem)-commodities.) The oil price is for Brent crude, one of the main benchmarks in the industry. 

3. Unless otherwise stated, “Africa” in this book refers to sub-Saharan Africa, excluding the North African states whose histories and economies broadly diverge from those of the countries south of the Sahara. (Sudan lies between the two; the UN classifies it as part of north Africa, and the World Bank and others classify it as part of sub-Saharan Africa, of which it would be the forty-ninth country). When I refer to resources I mean oil, gas, and other fossil fuels, minerals, ores, and precious stones, not agricultural commodities. 

4. Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Escaping the Resource Curse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1. 

5. Richard Dobbs, McKinsey Global Institute, Reverse the Curse: Maximizing the Potential of Resource-Driven Economies (New York: McKinsey and Company, December 2013), 5, www.mckinsey.com/insights/energy_resources_materials/ reverse_the_curse_maximizing_the_potential_of_resource_driven_economies. 9781610394390-text.indd 249 1/13/15 12:15 PM 250 notes to introduction 

6. The share of national income spent on education tends to decline once resource revenues start to flow, as do enrollment in secondary school and girls’ education. Oil exporters spend between two to ten times as much on their militaries than other countries do. Humphries, Sachs, and Stiglitz, Escaping the Resource Curse, 10–13. 

7. Said Djinnit, telephone interview with author, May 2010. 

8. World Bank, “Concept Note for a Trust Fund Proposal for the Legal and Local Sustainable Local Development Aspects and Transparency of Extractive Industry Development,” October 5, 2012, http://siteresources.worldbank.org /WBEUROPEEXTN/Resources/268436-1322648428296/8288771-132610759 2690/8357099-1349433248176/Concept_Note_Trust_Fund_Proposal.pdf. 

9. Ecobank, “Six Top Trends in Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) Extractives Industries,” July 23, 2013, www.ecobank.com/upload/20130813121743289489uJud Jb9GkE.pdf. 

10. These figures are for the whole African continent, not just sub-Saharan Africa. Merchandise Trade, World Trade Organization, www.wto.org/english /res_e/statis_e/its2011_e/its11_merch_trade_product_e.htm; OECD, Stats, http: //stats.oecd.org/qwids/#?x=2&y=6&f=3:51,4:1,1:1,5:3,7:1&q=3:51+4:1+1 :1+5:3+7:1+2:262,240,241,242,243,244,245,246,249,248,247,250,251,231+6:2003 ,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010,2011,2012.

11. According to the US Energy Information Administration, sub-Saharan Africa supplied 7 percent of the liquid fuels produced worldwide in 2012. Author’s calculation based on International Energy Statistics, http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=53&aid=1. 

12. Charlotte J. Lundgren, Alun H. Thomas, and Robert C. York, “Boom, Bust, or Prosperity? Managing Sub-Saharan Africa’s Natural Resource Wealth” (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2013), www.imf.org/external/ pubs/ft/dp/2013/dp1302.pdf; Oxford Policy Management, “Blessing or Curse? The Rise of Mineral Dependence Among Low- and Middle-Income Countries,” December 2011, www.opml.co.uk/sites/opml/files/Blessing%20or%20curse%20 The%20rise%20of%20mineral%20dependence%20among%20low-%20and%20 middle-income%20countries%20-%20web%20version.pdf. 

13. World Trade Organization data for 2010, cited above. Africa here means the entire continent. 14. Source for Nigeria: author’s calculations based on Nigeria, International Monetary Fund, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2014/cr14103.pdf, p. 25; source for Angola: author’s calculations based on Angola, International Monetary Fund, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2014/cr14274.pdf, p. 31. 9781610394390-text.indd 250 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 1 251 15. Andrew Mackenzie, Speech to the Melbourne Mining Club dinner, London, June 6, 2013, www.bhpbilliton.com/home/investors/reports/Documents/ 2013/130606%20-%20Andrew%20Mackenzie%20%20Melbourne%20Mining %20Club%20Speech%20final.pdf. 

chapter 1. 

Futungo, Inc. 

1. See the 2013 cost-of-living rankings by Mercer, www.mercer.co.in/newsroom /2013-cost-of-living-rankings.html. 

2. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, “Business Success, Angola-Style: Postcolonial Politics and the Rise and Rise of Sonangol,” Journal of Modern African Studies 45, no. 4 (December 2007): 595–619, 603, 610. 

3. Paula Cristina Roque, “Angola: Parallel Governments, Oil and Neopatrimonial System Reproduction,” Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria, June 2011, www.issafrica.org/uploads/SitRep2011_6JuneAngola.pdf. 

4. Jacques Marraud des Grottes, telephone interview with author, June 2012. 

5. The IMF’s first analysis of the hole in Angola’s accounts and the reasons for it can be found in “Angola—Fifth Review Under the Stand-By Arrangement with Angola,” International Monetary Fund, IMF Country Report No. 11/346, December 8, 2011. This and all other IMF reports on Angola are at www.imf.org/ external/country/ago. 

6. See, for example, “Angola: Officials Implicated in Killing Protest Organizers,” Human Rights Watch, November 22, 2013, www.hrw.org/news/2013/11/22/ angola-officials-implicated-killing-protest-organizers. 

7. “Cobalt International Energy,” Exceptional (Americas edition), July 2013, www.ey.com/US/en/Services/Strategic-Growth-Markets/Exceptional-magazine -Americas-edition-July-2013---Cobalt-International-Energy. 

8. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Will to Drill,” New York Times, January 14, 2011, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E6D61E3DF935A25 752C0A9679D8B63.

9. Jennifer Dawson, “Cobalt Expands Houston HQ After Angola Discovery,” Houston Business Journal, April 27, 2012, www.bizjournals.com/houston/ print-edition/2012/04/27/cobalt-expands-houston-hq-after-angola.html?page=all. 

10. Africa Confidential profile of General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Júnior (Kopelipa), www.africa-confidential.com/whos-who-profile/id/836. 

11. “A Crude Awakening,” Global Witness, December 1999, www.global witness.org/library/crude-awakening. 9781610394390-text.indd 251 1/13/15 12:15 PM 252 notes to chapter 1 

12. “Global Enforcement Report 2013,” TRACE International, March 2014, www.traceinternational.org/Knowledge/ger2013.html. 

13. The other oil venture in which José Domingos Manuel was a shareholder alongside Vicente, Dino, and Kopelipa was called Sociedade de Hidrocarbonetos de Angola, which was said to have interests in Guinea Bissau. Diário da República (Angola’s official journal), April 14, 2008. 

14. Rafael Marques de Morais, “The Angolan Presidency: The Epicentre of Corruption,” Maka Angola, July 2010, http://makaangola.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/04/PresidencyCorruption.pdf. 

15. Rafael Marques de Morais, “President’s Three Henchmen Lead the Plunder of State Assets in Angola,” Maka Angola, July 30, 2010, http://makaangola .org/maka-antigo/2010/07/30/trio-presidencial-lidera-o-saque-aos-bens-do -estado-angolanopresident%E2%80%99s-three-henchmen-lead-the-plunder -of-state-assets-in-angola/?lang=en; see also “Marques Takes Them On,” Africa Confidential, January 20, 2012, www.africa-confidential.com/article-preview/id /4305/Marques_takes_them_on. 

16. A US lawyer who asked not to be identified and who investigated Nazaki in 2008 on behalf of a different foreign oil company told me in February 2012 that he had been told by that company that Nazaki was controlled by Manuel Vicente and other officials.

17. Tom Burgis and Cynthia O’Murchu, “Angola Officials Held Hidden Oil Stakes,” Financial Times, April 15, 2012, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/effd6a98-854c -11e1-a394-00144feab49a.html#axzz3ERem20Du. 

18. Manuel Vicente, interview with author, Luanda, June 2012. 

19. Defense accounted for an average of 16.4 percent of South African government expenditure in the 1980s, with a high of 22.7 percent in 1982 and a low of 13.7 percent in 1987. See “South African Defence Review 2012,” South African Department of Defence, 89, www.sadefencereview2012.org/publications/ publications.htm. 

20. Manuel Alves da Rocha, economist at the Universidade Católica de Angola, interview with the author, Luanda, May 2012. 

21. Comments by Elias Isaac, witnessed by author, Angola country director for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, at Chatham House in London on September 17, 2013. 

22. Manuel Vicente, interview with author. 

23. António Tomás Ana, interview with author, Luanda, June 2012.

24. See, for example, Alexandre Neto, “Government Uses Military in Mass Forced Evictions,” Maka Angola, February 5, 2013, http://makaangola. 9781610394390-text.indd 252 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 1 253 org/maka-antigo/2013/02/05/aparato-de-guerra-usado-nas-demolicoes-em -cacuaco/?lang=en. 

25. Rosa Palavera, interview with author, Luanda, June 2012. 

26. Paulo Moreira (Portuguese PhD student living in Chicala to study the Angolan government’s slum policies), interview with author, Luanda, June 2012. 

27. The World Bank data for 2009 put 43 percent of Angolans below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day, adjusted for purchasing power parity. World Development Indicators, World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI .POV.DDAY. 

28. Delta Imobiliária’s role as the estate agent for Kilamba and other Chinese-built housing developments is confirmed in an August 28, 2013 press release by Sonip, the real estate arm of Sonangol, titled “Lista de beneficiários de habitações na centralidade do Kilamba atendimento de 02 a 06 de setembro de 2013.” Delta was announced in the Diário da República, Angola’s official journal, of October 13, 2008, alongside sister companies of Nazaki, the company through which Vicente, Kopelipa, and General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento held their concealed stakes in the Cobalt International Energy venture, although the documentation I have seen does not disclose Delta’s owners. For an account of Delta’s ownership and its role in Kilamba, see Rafael Marques de Morais, “Kopelipa e Manuel Vicente—Os Vendedores de Casas Sociais,” Maka Angola, September 26, 2011, http://makaangola.org/maka-antigo/2011/09/26/the-ill-gotten-gains -behind-the-kilamba-housing-development. Marques expanded on this in an e-mail exchange with the author, November 2013, saying that Grupo Aquattro Internacional, the same anonymously owned holding company through which Vicente, Kopelipa, and Dino held their stakes in Nazaki, owned Delta.

29. Rafael Marques de Morais, “Pro-Dos Santos Militias Attack Activists at Home,” Maka Angola, May 23, 2012, http://makaangola.org/maka-antigo/2012/ 05/23/milicias-pro-dos-santos-atacam/?lang=en. 

30. Paula Cristina Roque, “Angola’s Second Post-War Elections: The Alchemy of Change,” Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria, May 2013, www.issafrica.org/ uploads/SitRep2013_23May.pdf. 

31. Ibid. 

32. Magali Rheault and Bob Tortora, “Most African Leaders Enjoy Strong Support,” Gallup, April 25, 2012, www.gallup.com/poll/154088/african-leaders -enjoy-strong-support.aspx. 

33. Tom Burgis, “Cobalt to Fight SEC Corruption Allegations,” Financial Times, August 5, 2014, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ad3700c6-1cac-11e4-88c3 -00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ERem20Du. 9781610394390-text.indd 253 1/13/15 12:15 PM 254 notes to chapter 1

34. The share sales are net. See Tom Burgis, “Cobalt’s Returns from Angolan Venture Raise Wider Concerns,” Financial Times, November 20, 2013, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/36e28cf6-4bb5-11e3-a02f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3 ERem20Du. 

35. Ibid. 

36. Tom Burgis, “Cobalt Cuts Ties with Two Angola Oil Partners,” Financial Times, August 28, 2014, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c6c7028a-2e94-11e4-bffa -00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ERem20Du. 

37. Isaías Samakuva, interview with author, London, January 2014. 38. See, for example, “Chinese Company to Build 5,000 Social Houses in Angola,” Macauhub, August 31, 2011, www.macauhub.com.mo/en/2011/08/31/ chinese-company-to-build-5000-social-houses-in-angola, which quotes Fernando Fonseca, minister for urbanism and construction, as saying that a further phase of the Kilamba project was to be developed as a partnership between the Angolan government and China International Fund. A ceremony at which President dos Santos laid the founding stone for this new phase of Kilamba was reported in the February 2012 edition of CIF Space, China International Fund’s internal newsletter (in Chinese), www.chinainternationalfund.com/UserFiles/ Upload/20131868175041.pdf, p. 5. 

chapter 2: 

“it is forbidden to piss in the park” 

1. Pindar, “Olympian 1,” translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien, Perseus Digital Library, 1990, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0162. 

2. UN Development Programme, Human Development Indicators, at 2011 prices (http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/gni-capita-ppp-terms-constant-2011-ppp). Data from some countries, including Somalia and North Korea, are so hard to collect that they are not included in the rankings. 

3. Michael Nest, Coltan (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 

4. Blaine Harden, “The Dirt in the New Machine,” New York Times, August 12, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/08/12/magazine/the-dirt-in-the-new-machine .html.

5. Ibid. 

6. UN Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” April 12, 2001, contained in Kofi Annan’s letter to the United Nations Security Council, www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/96/96819_ congo_20021031.pdf. 9781610394390-text.indd 254 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 2 255 

7. Nest, Coltan, 12–13. 

8. Ibid., 13.

 9. Harden, “The Dirt in the New Machine.” 

10. Ibid. 

11. Nest, Coltan, 23; corroborated by author’s interviews. 

12. US Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity Summaries: Cobalt,” January 2013, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cobalt/mcs-2013-cobal .pdf.

13. Katumba’s story is drawn from interviews with former colleagues and rivals in Kinshasa and Goma, July 2013, and from his posthumously published memoir, Ma Vérité (Nice: EPI, 2013) (all quotations from this text translated by author). 

14. Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, interview with author, Harare, July 2013.

15. Katumba, Ma Vérité, 75. 

16. Oscar Mudiay, interview with author, Kinshasa, July 2013. 

17. Lutundula Commission, “Lutundula Report” (author’s translation), December 2005, part 1, www.conflictminerals.org/pdf/lutundula_commission_report_ contractreview.pdf. 

18. Katumba, Ma Vérité, 152. In French, Kabila addresses the much-younger Katumba as “petit,” an English approximation of which would be “kiddo.”

 19. Mawapanga, a Congolese army officer present at the fall of Pweto, and a Congolese businessman who knows the Kabila family each recounted versions of events similar to this in interviews with the author, Kinshasa and Goma, July 2013. The account of Katumba scrambling for fuel comes from Ma Vérité alone (152–153). 

20. UN Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” October 2002. 

21. “Gertler’s Assets Multiply,” Africa Confidential, May 24, 2013 www.africa -confidential.com/article-preview/id/4907/Gertler%e2%80%99s_assets_multiply. 

22. Olivier Kamitatu, interview with author, Kinshasa, July 2013. 

23. The account of the massacre at Kilwa is drawn from Monuc, “Report on the Conclusions of the Special Investigation into Allegations of Summary Executions and Other Violations of Human Rights Committed by the FARDC in Kilwa (Province of Katanga) on 15 October 2004,” ABC News, www.abc.net .au/4corners/content/2005/MONUC_report_oct05.pdf. 

24. Lutundula Commission, “Lutundula Report.” 

25. Sally Neighbour, “The Kilwa Incident Transcript,” Four Corners (ABC), June 6, 2005, www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1386467.htm. 

26.Rights and Accountability in Development, Global Witness, Action Contre 9781610394390-text.indd 255 1/13/15 12:15 PM 256 notes to chapter 2 l’Impunité pour les Droits Humains and Association Africaine de Défense des Droits de l’Homme, “Kilwa Trial: A Denial of Justice,” July 17, 2007, www.global witness.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/kilwa_chron_en_170707.pdf. In 2007 a Congolese military court found not guilty Anvil Mining and soldiers accused of being responsible for the massacre at Kilwa, a verdict that drew protests from, among others, Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights. 

27. Monuc, “Report on the Conclusions of the Special Investigation . . .” 

28. The Monuc team recorded that Anvil accepted that the army used its vehicles but denied that they were used to transport loot or corpses, and that it admitted paying some of the soldiers. 

29. Bill Turner, e-mail exchange with author, October 2014. 

30. US Embassy Kinshasa, “Augustin Katumba, President’s Alleged Treasurer and Enforcer, Steps Down as Head of National Assembly’s Ruling Coalition; His Influence Could Remain,” December 14, 2009, WikiLeaks, September 1, 2011, www.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/12/09KINSHASA1080.html. 

31. UN Security Council, “Fourth Special Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” November 21, 2008, www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65 BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/DRC%20S%202008%20 728.pdf. 

32. For the size of Nkunda’s force, see “Eastern Congo: Why Stabilisation Failed,” International Crisis Group, October 4, 2012, www.crisisgroup.org/en/ regions/africa/central-africa/dr-congo/b091-eastern-congo-why-stabilisation -failed.aspx. For the CNDP’s recruitment of child soldiers, see “DR Congo: UN Mission Says Recruitment of Child Soldiers Is Surging,” UN News Centre, December 14, 2007, www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=25076. 

33. Matthew Green, “Congo’s Rebel Leader Has Political Goal in His Sights,” Financial Times, November 15, 2008. 

34. East Congolese who has worked in both mining and intelligence and who asked not to be identified, interview with author, Kinshasa, July 2013.

35. Olivier Hamuli, interview with author, Goma, July 2013. 

36. UN Security Council, “Fourth Special Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” 

37. A map of military involvement in mining in the Kivus, published in August 2009 by the Belgium-based independent research institute, the International Peace Information Service, offers further evidence of the commercial relationship between Mwangachuchu and the CNDP. Drawing on interviews in the mining 9781610394390-text.indd 256 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 2 257 areas and official data, the researchers established that armed groups had positions at more than half of the mines in the Kivus, tapping into the trade in tin, gold, and tungsten as well as coltan. They found that in Bibatama and the surrounding mining areas the former CNDP cadres—by then theoretically absorbed into the national army—taxed miners $2 a month. See “Militarised Mining Areas in the Kivus,” International Peace Information Service, August 2009, www.ipis research.be/mining-sites-kivus.php. 

38. “A Comprehensive Approach to Congo’s Conflict Minerals,” Enough Project, April 2009, www.enoughproject.org/files/minerals_activist_brief.pdf. Other experts I spoke with deemed the Enough Project’s figure of $185 million in minerals revenues to the armed groups a reasonable estimate. 

39. UN Security Council, “Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” December 2, 2011, www.un.org/ga/search/view_ doc.asp?symbol=S/2011/738. The experts reported, “At Rubaya, Ntaganda gains large revenues from taxation levied by ‘parallel’ mine police.” Rubaya is the main mining town in Mwangachuchu’s concession; Bosco Ntaganda was chief of the military wing of the CNDP when it was incorporated into the Congolese army. 

40. Foreign election observer, telephone interview with author, November 2013. 

41. “DR Congo: Rein in Security Forces,” Human Rights Watch, December 2, 2011, www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/02/dr-congo-rein-security-forces. 

42. “Letter Dated 18 May 2012 from the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo addressed to the Chair of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B -6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/DRC%20S%202012%20348.pdf. 

43. “Letter Dated 12 November 2012 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Addressed to the President of the Security Council,” www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8 CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2012_843.pdf. The UN investigators found that “the Government of Rwanda continues to violate the arms embargo by providing direct military support to the M23 rebels, facilitating recruitment, encouraging and facilitating desertions from the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and providing arms, ammunition, intelligence and political advice. The de facto chain of command of M23 includes Gen Bosco Ntaganda and culminates with the Minister of Defence of Rwanda, Gen James Kabarebe.” 

44. The record of the conversation between Kabarebe and Mwangachuchu is in “DR Congo: M23 Rebels Committing War Crimes,” Human Rights 9781610394390-text.indd 257 1/13/15 12:15 PM 258 notes to chapter 2 Watch, September 11, 2012, www.hrw.org/news/2012/09/11/dr-congo-m23-rebels -committing-war-crimes. The HRW report also notes Rwandan denials of UN findings that it backed M23: “The Rwandan government, in its official response to the UN Group of Experts, said that the phone calls between Rwandan officials and Congolese individuals had ‘deliberately been taken out of context’ and that those made by Kabarebe were ‘aimed at avoiding a return to violence and [to] promote political dialogue.’”

45. US, Switzerland Back IOM Emergency Operations in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, International Organisation for Migration, July 5, 2013. 

46. This trip to eastern Congo produced material for a series of articles as part of the Financial Times’ seasonal appeal on behalf of Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger), published in November and December 2012, www. actionagainsthunger.org/taxonomy/partnerships/corporate/financial-times. 

47. “Kabila au deuil de Katumba Mwanke,” YouTube, February 13, 2012, www. youtube.com/watch?v=kmNUYi3WVsE. 

48. Franz Wild, Michael J. Kavanagh, and Jonathan Ferziger, “Gertler Earns Billions as Mine Deals Fail to Enrich Congo,” Bloomberg, December 5, 2012, www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-05/gertler-earns-billions-as-mine-deals -leave-congo-poorest.html. A person with knowledge of Gertler’s arrival in Congo confirmed this with the author.

49. UN Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” April 12, 2001. 

50. Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, interview with author. 

51. UN Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” April 12, 2001. 

52. Former senior Congolese official, interview with author, Kinshasa, July 2013. The International Monetary Fund welcomed the abolition of the monopoly in its Article IV consultation of July 2001, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2001/ cr01114.pdf, p. 25.

53. Katumba, Ma Vérité, 204. I asked a representative of Dan Gertler whether he would confirm that the party had taken place and that Geller had attended. The representative (by e-mail, November 2013) declined to confirm or deny the visit but said that “any reference to Uri Geller is gossip and tittle-tattle and simply not so.” In December 2013 Geller told me in a telephone interview that he had indeed attended the event on a yacht, though he declined to comment on who else was present. When I again asked Gertler’s representative to confirm 9781610394390-text.indd 258 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 2 259 Geller’s comments, the representative did not respond. The leaked US embassy cable from December 14, 2009 (US Embassy Kinshasa, “Augustin Katumba,” WikiLeaks), says, “Gertler has invited Katumba to Israel often.” 

54. Katumba, Ma Vérité, 208.

55. Former minister, interview with author, Kinshasa, July 2013. 

56. Kamitatu, interview with author. 

57. Katumba, Ma Vérité, 200. 

58. Jason K. Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), xxiv. 

59. Wild, Kavanagh, and Ferziger, “Gertler Earns Billions as Mine Deals Fail to Enrich Congo.” 

60. The account of the SMKK deals is pieced together from public rec ords. Much of the work in deciphering and publicizing this and other similar deals in Congo was done by Franz Wild, Michael Kavanagh, and others at Bloomberg as well as by Daniel Balint-Kurti and others at Global Witness. The deals are summarized in “Equity in Extractives,” Africa Progress Panel, 2013, http://africaprogresspanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013_APR_Equity _in_Extractives_25062013_ENG_HR.pdf. 

61. The Canadian junior was Melkior Resources. For the contract creating SMKK, see mines-rdc.cd/fr/documents/avant/gcm_melkior%20resources%20 inc.pdf. 

62. The reference to Gécamines having mined the SMKK site in the 1980s comes from a statement to the market by Camec titled “Central African Mining & Exploration Company Plc Acquires Extensive Copper & Cobalt Assets in the DRC,” October 23, 2008, www.infomine.com/index/pr/Pa687196.PDF. 

63. Following a few prior related transactions beginning in November 2007, in October 2008 Camec, a London-listed company founded by Andrew Groves, a veteran of mining deals in misruled African countries, along with Phil Edmonds, a former England cricketer, bought 50 percent of SMKK for $85 million from a company called Cofiparinter (see “Central African Mining & Exploration Company Plc Acquires Extensive Copper & Cobalt assets in the DRC”). The ultimate owners of Cofiparinter, which, according to a company search, is registered in Luxembourg, were not revealed. But the deal was contingent on Camec, which had already done business with Gertler elsewhere in Katanga, buying out a Gert ler company, registered in Gibraltar and called Prairie International, from the joint venture they shared. (A Camec statement of March 4, 2008 titled “DRC Update” announced the creation of a joint venture to run the Mukondo copper and cobalt mine between a Camec subsidiary and Prairie International, which 9781610394390-text.indd 259 1/13/15 12:15 PM 260 notes to chapter 2 is described as “a company in which a Trust for the benefit of the family of Dan Gertler is a major shareholder.” Investegate, www.investegate.co.uk/article.aspx ?id=200803101030017150P). The agreement added to Camec’s valuable portfolio in Congo, which included assets it took over from Billy Rautenbach, a Zimbabwean businessman close to Robert Mugabe who had once run Gécamines for Laurent Kabila before falling out with the Congolese authorities and ending up on the EU’s Zimbabwe sanctions list. (The June 2006 report of the UN Panel of Experts on Congo describes Rautenbach as “a major shareholder” in Boss Mining, which was subsequently acquired by Camec. “Letter Dated 18 July 2006 from the Chairman of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Addressed to the President of the Security Council,” www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol =S/2006/525. Decision 2011/101/CFSP of the European Council, February 15, 2011, has Rautenbach’s name on the list of people and entities subject to sanctions and describes him as a “businessman with strong ties to the Government of Zimbabwe, including through support to senior regime officials during Zimbabwe’s intervention in DRC.” Official Journal of the European Union, http://eur-lex. europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:042:0006:0023:EN:PDF.) In September 2009 ENRC announced it was buying Camec, which also had assets elsewhere, for £584 million, a 67 percent premium on the predeal price of Camec’s shares. First on the list of ENRC’s rationales for the deal was that it would yield access to significant assets in Congo, which included Camec’s 50 percent share in SMKK in the Katangan copperbelt. 

64. Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, “May 2010 Interim Management Statement and Production Report for the First Quarter Ended 31 March 2010,” May 13, 2010, www.enrc.com/ru/regulatory_news_article/1993. 

65. The memorandum of association that gives Emerald Star Enterprises Ltd.’s incorporation date as October 29, 2009 was published by Eric Joyce, a British MP who has unearthed details about Gertler companies operating in Congo (http://ericjoyce.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/10-bvi-records-emerald-star -enterprises-ltd0001.pdf). See also Joyce’s database of shell companies operating in Congo, http://ericjoyce.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2011/11/drc_shell_ companies.pdf. 

66. ENRC’s “Announcement of 2010 Preliminary Results,” March 23, 2011, describes Emerald Star Enterprises Limited as “an entity controlled by the Gertler family trust” (67), www.enrc.com/regulatory_news_article/2015. 

67. “Contrat de Cession des Parts entre la Generale des Carrieres et des Mines et Emerald Star Enterprises Limited,” Congo’s Ministry of Mines, February 1, 9781610394390-text.indd 260 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 2 261 2010, http://mines-rdc.cd/fr/documents/contrat_cession_parts_gcm_smkk_fev_ 2010.pdf. 

68. “The acquisition of [Emerald Star] was effectively completed and control obtained by the Group in June 2010.” ENRC, “Announcement of 2010 Preliminary Results.” 

69. The sale of 50 percent of SMKK by Gécamines to Emerald Star would only come into force once a right of first refusal was waived by Cofiparinter, the vehicle through which the stake had been acquired by Camec, which ENRC had subsequently purchased. “Contrat de Cession des Parts entre la Generale des Carrieres et des Mines et Emerald Star Enterprises Limited,” 15. 

70. James Wilson, Jonathan Guthrie, and David Oakley, “ENRC ‘Should Have Set Off Alarm Bells,’” Financial Times, November 22, 2013, www.ft.com/intl/ cms/s/0/1995e548-5368-11e3-b425-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3EoUGcJ7h. 

71. Caroline Binham, Jonathan Guthrie, Cynthia O’Murchu, and Guy Chazan, “UK Fraud Unit Seeks ENRC Answers,” Financial Times, July 11, 2013, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2fceb4e0-ea48-11e2-b2f4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz 3EoUGcJ7h. 

72. The terms of the offer, including the £2.28 valuation, were set out in a ENRC statement to the market on August 8, 2013, headed “Response to Offer,” www.enrc.com/regulatory_news_article/3791. 

73. The calculations in Africa Progress Panel’s “Equity in Extractives” report were based on the difference between the prices at which the state sold mining assets to companies linked to Gertler and either the price at which he sold them or valuations conducted by other companies that held stakes in them as well as by independent analysts. Representatives of Gertler told the author privately that the Africa Progress Panel report’s description of these transactions and calculations based on them contained errors. The ten-page list of questions sent to Gertler’s representatives in September 2013 seeking comments for this book included a breakdown of each of the transactions mentioned in the report as well as the author’s own understanding of them. The author specifically asked whether there were inaccuracies in each of the descriptions of the transactions. Despite repeated assurances that a reply was forthcoming, none arrived. 

74. According to the OECD/DAC International Development Statistics Data base, the total humanitarian aid from all donors to Congo between 2010 and 2012 was $1.29 billion. Congo consistently ranks among the largest recipients of humanitarian aid. www.oecd.org/dac/stats/idsonline.htm. 

75. “Etude analytique sur la contribution du secteur minier au budget de l’Etat,” Congolese Senate, January 2013, report in author’s possession. 9781610394390-text.indd 261 1/13/15 12:15 PM 262 notes to chapter 2 

76. Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 78–79, 108. 

77. Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives. See p. 58 and Annex 2 for details of the Mutanda and Kansuki transactions involving Glencore. 

78. ENRC did not respond to questions I sent to the company in 2014 about the SMKK transaction; Glencore had no specific comment on the Africa Progress Panel report, though it challenged some of the report’s assumptions. E-mails from the author to spokespeople for Glencore and ENRC, November 2014. 

79. UN Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” April 12, 2001. 

80. Senior FARDC officer, interview with author, Goma, July 2013. Viktor Bout’s connections to the coltan trade are detailed in “Supporting the War Economy in the DRC: European Companies and the Coltan Trade,” International Peace Information Service, January 2002, www.ipisresearch.be/download.php?id=197. 

81. Senior FARDC officer, interview with author.

82. Katrina Manson, “Central Africa: The Quest for Clean Hands,” Financial Times, December 18, 2012, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b69124a4-394f-11e2-8881 -00144feabdc0.html#axzz3EoXwAFEn. 

83. Michael Priester, “Baseline Audits of Mining Companies in Democratic Republic of the Congo to the CTC Standard Set: Mwangachuchu Hizi International Baseline Audit Report,” DRC Ministry of Mines and BGR, April 2012, www.bgr.bund.de/EN/Themen/Min_rohstoffe/CTC/Downloads/mhi_mine .pdf ?__blob=publicationFile&v=3. 

84. World Bank, “Democratic Republic of Congo: Growth with Governance in the Mining Sector,” May 2008, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTO GMC/Resources/336099-1156955107170/drcgrowthgovernanceenglish.pdf. 

85. Pole Institute, “Blood Minerals: The Criminalisation of the Mining Industry in Eastern DRC,” Friends of the Congo, August 2010, www.friendsofthe congo.org/pdf/blood_minerals_pole_aug2010.pdf. 

86. Fidel Bafilemba, Timo Mueller, and Sasha Lezhnev, “The Impact of Dodd-Frank and Conflict Minerals Reforms on Eastern Congo’s War,” Enough Project, June 2014, www.enoughproject.org/reports/impact-dodd-frank-andconflict-minerals-reforms-eastern-congo%E2%80%99s-war. 

87. “As June 2nd Conflict Minerals Deadline Approaches, Global Witness Warns That First Reports Lack Substance,” Global Witness, May 29, 2014, www.globalwitness.org/library/june-2nd-conflict-minerals-deadline-approaches -global-witness-warns-first-reports-lack. 9781610394390-text.indd 262 1/13/15 12:15 PM notes to chapter 3 263 

88. Pole Institute, “Blood Minerals.” 

89. Wild, Kavanagh, and Ferziger, “Gertler Earns Billions as Mine Deals Fail to Enrich Congo.” 

90. For example, the rights to the Kolwezi, Frontier, and Lonshi mines passed to companies linked to Gertler after they were confiscated from Canadian mining company First Quantum Minerals. 

91. Fleurette Group website, http://fleurettegroup.com, accessed January 2014. 92. Wild, Kavanagh, and Ferziger, “Gertler Earns Billions as Mine Deals Fail to Enrich Congo.”

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