Congo Holdup is the biggest leak of data
in the history of Africa.
And more than 3.5 million documents
of financial data that comes from a bank called BGFI
show the world what's been happening
in Congo at this one particular bank in a way
and at a level of detail that we've never seen before.
The sort of overarching discovery was to show
how the most powerful political family in the country
and its friends had sort of tooled up this bank
to transfer large amounts of state funds to themselves.
And what we found out in the leak
had a lot of very interesting things to say about
the way some of the Chinese mining companies
that have come to dominate this sector in recent years
have operated in the country, and in particular,
the relationship between them and the entourage
around former president Joseph Kabila.
Laurent Kabila was laid to rest a week
after being shot by his own bodyguard
in one of the most bizarre of political assassinations.
He's succeeded by his son Joseph,
believed by many to be under ...
Joseph Kabila was the President of
the Democratic Republic of Congo for almost two decades.
He came into power in 2001 as a very young man.
He was only 29.
He succeeded his father who had also been president
who was assassinated by a trusted bodyguard.
Kabila senior had come to power only a couple of years
earlier in 1997 by marching a rebel army
right across the vastness of Congo
and overthrowing a dictator who had been in power
for more than 30 years.
But soon after Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu,
he kind of continued the kleptocratic ways of Mobutu,
and his former patrons Rwanda and Uganda got angry
and they started another war.
And this became what's known as Africa's world war
and millions of people died.
Almost all of Congo's neighbors became involved.
There is no security.
People are plundering.
They are doing what they call pillage.
It was bloody.
It was long.
And it ended up dividing the country into several slices
with different rebel groups controlling different parts
and different countries allied
to those different rebel groups.
If we are able to reunify Congo,
we will be able to do anything else.
Joseph Kabila actually brought that war to an end
in 2003, negotiating a settlement with
all the various countries that were involved.
Soon he was eventually elected president in 2006
and he took over a country that is one of
the richest countries in the world
in terms of natural resources,
but its population is one of the poorest.
Joseph Kabila was looking to rebuild the country,
rebuild the economy and he needed cash.
He tried to open up Congo's vast and world-class reserves
of copper, cobalt, gold to international investors.
At the beginning, there were plenty of western companies
who showed interests in investing in
and developing these assets.
But over time their interest has dwindled.
And they've departed partly because of the unpredictability
of Congolese politics,
partly because of the reputation for corruption in Congo.
But this isn't to say that
there are not major western companies there.
In fact, the biggest producer of cobalt,
it may well be the biggest producer of copper is Glencore
which is headquartered in Switzerland.
But however, in recent years, the trajectory has been
more and more Chinese companies coming in.
Congo has a very, very significant mining industry.
It's Africa's biggest producer of copper.
It's by far the world's biggest producer of cobalt.
And say the last 10 to 15 years Chinese companies
making the running, piling in with investments.
So they've gone from a pretty bit part player
to the largest producers of both metals in Congo.
The deal that really turbocharged the involvement
of Chinese mining companies in the Congolese mining sector
happened in 2008.
And according to this deal, Chinese companies would build
three billion dollars of infrastructure
and also invest in additional $3.2 billion
in a huge copper, cobalt mining project called Sicomines.
And it would be profits generated by sales of copper
and cobalt from Sicomines
that would pay back both investments in the infrastructure
and in the mine itself.
Sicomines is the mining component of
what was known at one point as the deal of the century,
basically trading Congo's minerals, copper and cobalt
for three billion dollars worth of infrastructure projects
because Congo is in desperate need after years of war
for roads, for bridges, for schools and hospitals.
The Chinese started to provide that.
The Sicomines mine, or more accurately, mines
are located just outside Kolwezi
which is a major mining hub in southeastern Congo.
And I've visited the mine several times.
It is world-class, massive.
You see trucks that are the size of a house,
sometimes hundreds of trucks, just in a row of procession
coming up and down the switchbacks of the mine
to get the ore out of the mine,
and then it goes to a massive processing plant,
again, world-class, that produces copper cathodes and cobalt
which then gets shipped to China to be turned into
pipes and wiring and car batteries and all the things
that are so important for the green revolution.
There has always been a quite considerable lack
of transparency around the Sicomines project.
And also the infrastructure projects
that Sicomines is paying for
because Sicomines' profits are more or less tax free
until the debts are all paid off.
There is a lot of irritation and concern within the Congo
that this huge mining project is not really
producing any benefit for Congo
in terms of tax revenue and royalty revenue.
So the leak was obtained by a French anti-corruption
organization called The Platform
to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa
and the French investigative news website MediaPart.
And then it was shared with Bloomberg and with a number
of other media outlets and NGOs throughout the world
to comb through these documents over many, many months.
We can't disclose the source of these documents
because it's just not safe.
In the leak, there were all kinds of threads
that we could pull.
One was that the bank at the heart of this project,
which is called BGFI.
It's a Gabonese bank and it's a pan-African bank
that has branches all over Africa
but also in France as well.
It often partners with local elites
in the countries where it operates.
And in the case of Congo, a sister of the president
who took a minority stake in the bank.
The amazing thing is that the sister
of the president actually never paid for her
40% stake in the bank.
And one of Kabila's brothers, Francis Selemani
became the bank's chief executive.
So right from the beginning of the existence
of BGFI Bank's unit in Congo, it isn't really a stretch
to call it a Kabila family company.
Basically over a six-year period, this bank had acted
as a conduit to funnel at least 138 million dollars
in public funds to companies controlled by the family
of the then president Joseph Kabila or associates of him.
That money came from the Congolese Central Bank.
It came from Congo's state-owned mining company
and it even came from the agency responsible for
the upkeep of Congo's dire road network.
The other thing it allowed us to do for the first time
was show how major Chinese corporations were giving money
to companies that eventually transferred that money
to businesses that were linked to Kabila family
and associates.
One of the key figures of interest in our research
was a Chinese businessman named Du Wei
and his company, Congo Construction Company
which held two accounts in BGFI Bank's Congolese unit.
What's amazing about Congo Construction Company is that
we don't think it's constructed anything.
We've found nothing that they've built
over almost a decade of existence in Congo.
And yet we found tens of millions of dollars
flowing through their bank accounts from major
established Chinese companies through the BGFI Bank
to businesses linked to the Kabila family.
And Du Wei was born in 1979, but he was in Congo
in his early twenties, already
doing deals and doing projects.
And he actually worked for Sicomines,
the mine at the heart of the China-Congo contract.
And then amazingly, he switched sides.
He switched to the Congolese side
and started working with the office
that managed the China-Congo contract.
And soon after that, he created a company
with a Congolese lawyer, Congo Construction Company.
He was also a PhD student at the University of Wuhan.
He published a paper which was complaining about
the tendency of Chinese companies to engage in
what he called unscrupulous means
such as bribery and corruption
to win major infrastructure projects
in the developing world.
So probably the most sort of brazen and illuminating way
in which Du Wei and Congo Construction Company's role
as an intermediary was demonstrated was in 2016
when Sicomines transferred 25 million dollars
to Congo Construction Company.
Du Wei subsequently distributed most of this money
among people associated with Joseph Kabila.
7.5 million dollars went to a company
controlled by Kabila's sister and Kabila's sister-in-law.
1.6 million was wired to a company in the Faroe Islands
that operated a vessel which was used
to transport animals, such as wildebeests,
zebras, giraffes,
to Joseph Kabila's private nature reserve
just outside Kinshasa.
And another million dollars was sent to
the director of this company.
Some of these very large transactions are questionable
simply because they don't seem to have
a legitimate commercial justification behind them.
And Joseph Kabila is the very, very guy
who gave Sicomines the right to develop
these very, very lucrative copper and cobalt permits.
The money that was supposed to fund the infrastructure
for Congolese citizens, you know, took away, you know
The money gone to president Kabila.
So it was so surprising.
Because you see the agreement is like,
okay, we are going to fund the infrastructure.
And definitely understand why we didn't see
infrastructure in the Congo.
I think it's really, this is really crazy.
Thank you for the opportunity and the honor
of having shared your experience and your wisdom
with me over the last 17 years.
Basically since 2018, the year before Kabila stepped down
which was also the year where BGFI Bank forced out
his brother and his sister from the bank
amid accumulating scandals caused by a smaller leak
of information the year before.
Ever since then, BGFI Bank has been trying to draw a line
under its association with the Kabila family.
BGFI Bank declined to respond to any of our questions
before we began publishing the results of our investigation.
They eventually did put out a statement on their website.
BGFI said that there had been management issues
at the Congo branch of BGFI
and that they'd addressed them years ago.
It did, however, also question
why these documents were leaked and suggested that
maybe those documents, some were forged or inauthentic,
and they suggested that they would pursue
anyone who leaked these documents.
Joseph Kabila never responded to multiple requests
from the Congo Hold-up Consortium,
or Bloomberg News about the allegations
that were made through our investigations.
Some of his associates did come out
and sullied the investigation,
suggested that they were inauthentic,
suggested that there were some kind of smear campaign
attacking the former president.
Du Wei never responded to any of Congo Hold-up's questions
or questions from Bloomberg.
And in fact, he seems to have deleted his WhatsApp account
after we've bombarded him with questions about
his business dealings in Congo.
He's no longer in Congo.
Sicomines denied all allegations.
They said that they were fictitious and made up
and that they'd always worked within the bounds
of Congolese law and international law
when it comes to good business practices.
I think one of the most interesting takeaways
is the scale.
We're talking about one bank,
a relatively modest Congolese bank
over a six or seven-year period,
and this is only the money that we can be
absolutely sure about that we can trace
to the satisfaction of our reporting standards.
It's really a lot of money, especially when you consider
that this is happening in one of the poorest countries
on the planet.
One of the things that Congo Hold-up tried to highlight
is that there are different actors.
They put in place a complex and complicated system
with the purpose to steal money.
Without Congo Hold-up investigation,
I don't think it was even possible for us
to definitely understand, you know, who played which role?
It's not a surprise that there is corruption in Congo.
The Congolese know this better than anyone.
They experience it on a daily basis.
The difference with the Congo Hold-up consortium is
that we were able to bring the receipts.
That has been a boon for Congolese civil society
and so there are a lot of groups, Congolese groups
that are now fighting to hold them accountable
and so that's an exciting development.