The elements of power, p.18
The Elements of Power, page 18
The culture at Glencore was intense, and the company focused single-mindedly on making money—sometimes, it seemed, at any cost. In 2023, a New York federal judge would order the firm to pay $700 million after it pleaded guilty, in 2022, to a long-running bribery scheme involving foreign officials in eight countries, including Congo. “In the DRC,” the judge said, “Glencore admitted that it conspired to and did corruptly offer and pay approximately $27.5 million to third parties, while intending for a portion of the payments to be used as bribes to DRC officials, in order to secure improper business advantages.” The “third parties” were known as agents. “Almost everybody used agents,” a former Glencore trader told me.
* * *
By the mid-2000s, Gertler had, for a foreigner, amassed enormous power and assets in Katanga. George Arthur Forrest still controlled what Katumba once described as the “flower” of Katangese mining—the Kamoto deposit—but Gertler was quietly buying up more and more shares of Kamoto, and he owned two giant concessions: KOV and Kansuki, which abutted Mutanda. Money was essential to keeping the deals flowing. The record of the arbitration proceedings between Dan Gertler and the Gertner brothers does not show explicit bribery, but it does illustrate how Gertler cycled huge amounts of cash and diamonds to Katumba and others at the apex of Congolese politics in an extensive program of penumbral transactions. “What does he [Katumba] get in return for all this?” a lawyer asked Mendi Gertner during the proceedings. “Mr. Gertler’s friendship?” Gertner said that he and his business partners had agreed for 15 percent of the shares of the business to go to “local people.” Shell companies and code words were used, and payments were obscured. During the arbitration, Gertler was not forthcoming on this matter, but his answer to one of the questions hints at the web of transnational companies being used to extract wealth from Congo and aggregate it into a few pockets. “It’s none of your business whether it was in my account in Panama, an account in Cyprus, or an account in Gibraltar,” the Israeli businessman said when questioned about payments to Katumba.
Glencore officials saw working with Gertler as a matter of expediency, and they wondered if the Congolese had been a little taken in by the foreigners operating in the country, people like Forrest and Gertler whom they considered big talkers with little to back themselves up. Frankly, they seemed a little amateur to people with knowledge of international finance. “Suddenly Kabila has these mines—what are you going to do with them?” a former Glencore official later said. “And you have these two monkeys [Gertler and Forrest] who say they can find investors who want to put money into them.” Gertler kept asking for money and was extremely litigious. Forrest was better liked by Glencore officials, but he was also looked at with some skepticism: He would make a habit of insisting that investors from far-flung places were on the cusp of putting money into his projects, and then the deals never materialized.
There was no denying, however, that Gertler had something unique: both the president’s ear and the ear of Kabila’s éminence grise, Katumba.
In his autobiography, Katumba reveals how Gertler once invited him and his wife, Zozo, on a yachting holiday around the Israeli port city of Eilat: “Me, the little Congolese from Pweto, I looked at this world with wide, marvelling eyes.” Early on a Friday evening during the trip, the celebrity magician Uri Geller, of spoon-bending fame, visited the boat. Katumba was impressed, but Zozo got the heebie-jeebies. Gertler advised Katumba to use his time in Israel to get medical treatment for the aftereffects of an old car accident. As he recovered from an operation at a medical center in Tel Aviv, Katumba fell into a coma, then awoke to see his friend Gertler along with a rabbi, whom the businessman had brought in to pray for him.
Gertler, who’d also gotten doctors to come in from London, had “saved my life,” Katumba writes. When he woke, he was paralyzed and could not talk or eat. The rabbi spoke to Katumba for a long time about good and evil, urging him to give freely. As he recovered, he writes, the message resonated. “Thanks to Dan and his Rabbi, I found a new religion, a new family,” Katumba effuses. “Dan, my friend, my ‘twin brother,’ despite everything that appears to make us different, I am proud to be the brother that you didn’t have. Let us be at one with one another, for ever.”
When Katumba returned from Israel, people in Kinshasa noticed that something had changed. “After that, Dan became Augustin’s number-one guy,” Melissa Sanderson, the former U.S. chargé d’affaires, told me. “Because at that point, it wasn’t just about money anymore.”
Alongside Gertler and figures like him, Katumba and a coterie of politicians in Kabila’s government helped construct a sort of parallel payment system that aggregated money not into the state’s coffers but into private pockets. As the Carter Center, a human-rights and transparency NGO, later documented in a 2017 investigative report, Gécamines was again being used as a vache laitière, echoing the use to which Mobutu Sese Seko and his elites had put the parastatal. The authors of the Carter Center report argued that corruption through Gécamines, which usually retained 20 or so percent of mining projects, was hard-baked into the Kabila system of government, in which backdoor deals proliferated. “Wolves don’t eat among themselves,” a popular Congolese saying went, meaning that the corrupt had to cooperate in order to steal. It was, the Carter Center report opined, “a far cry from the competitive, well-organized licensing system that the World Bank had envisaged at the adoption of the 2002 Mining Code.”
Katumba, in particular, seemed to be surrounded by scandal, but nothing stuck. “He became the shadow of the chief,” a Congolese journalist once told me. When a UN report accused Katumba of corruption and suggested that he be banned from travel because of his involvement in corrupt deals, Kabila relieved him of his position. But Katumba wouldn’t be out in the cold for long.
Chapter 24
Oozing Evil
By the 2010s, Katanga had developed a fully-fledged parallel economy that revolved around minerals, deals, and occasionally violence. Powerful figures profited from instability. State offices were split along ethnic fault lines that recalled those that divided the Congolese people during the days of the Katangese secession. The Lunda formed the backbone of the provincial mining office in Kolwezi, the Luba in Lubumbashi; people from the Chokwe ethnic group ran the mine regulator; and the Hemba—Odilon Kajumba Kilanga and Kufi Kilanga’s people—predominated at the atomic-energy regulator, which had to sign off on potentially radioactive ores.
In Congo, as the online newspaper Africa Intelligence pointed out at the time, “ethnic allegiances take precedence over everything, especially in natural resources management.” The country’s mines would provide “the manna that will finance the country’s presidential and provincial elections and military operations to repel foreign forces.” And the political and economic elites who controlled them would control Congo.
Augustin Katumba Mwanke sat at the apex of the shadow hierarchy in Katanga. Katumba also had a particular interest in Bill Turner’s Anvil Mining, which operated the Dikulushi copper-and-silver mine. The Australian company was one of the few groups that had managed to operate relatively unscathed since the days of the Karavia fire sale. From 2001 to 2004, Katumba even sat on Anvil’s board; the company paid him for attending meetings and leased its office in Lubumbashi from him. The group was well connected to other powerful figures too—Raphaël Katebe Katoto, Moïse Katumbi’s brother, leased machinery to the company.
But then, in October 2004, a young fisherman named Alain Kazadi Makalayi gathered a handful of men and a smattering of weapons, denounced Katumba and Kabila for “pocketing money from the mines,” and seized the nearby town of Kilwa, declaring a new separatist state of Katanga.
Anvil provided trucks and aircraft for the army’s counterattack: According to a UN investigation, once Kazadi and his forces were neutralized, soldiers from the Congolese army’s 62nd Infantry Brigade went house to house, rounding up civilians for supposedly abetting the uprising. At least seventy-three people were killed, and the UN documented some twenty-eight summary executions. The soldiers also ransacked the town, raping and torturing scores of civilians.
In their report, UN investigators hinted that the uprising and subsequent killings were somehow orchestrated by figures in the Congolese establishment, perhaps as part of a higher-level struggle to control resources. Anvil denied wrongdoing and said that the army had coerced it into supplying matériel, but the company was sued in Canada for abetting war crimes; the case was eventually dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. After the incident, Katumba himself visited the area to convince traumatized civilians that it was safe to return home.
* * *
The use of violent groups to seize powerful resources was a frequently employed tactic of powerful figures in Congo. In the 2000s and 2010s, for example, Nkambo Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga Wa Bafunkwa Kanonga, a Catholic altar boy turned schoolmaster turned warlord, ran a brutal insurgency in northern Katanga, not far from Dikulushi.
Gédéon had originally been part of the Mai-Mai—fighters mobilized by Laurent-Désiré Kabila who sprinkled themselves with blessed water in the belief that it would ward off bullets—and he had risen to power through brutality and by claiming that he was in possession of powerful “gris-gris,” or magical charms, that he had collected near the town of Malemba-Nkulu. Mines for valuable minerals like tin and coltan, an ore of tantalum, lie in and around this area. Tantalum is in demand for use in capacitors, which store electricity in modern devices; John B. Goodenough had looked at using it for a lithium-ion battery cathode, but concluded it was too heavy.
Gédéon’s former spokesman, Thierry Mukelekele, told me that Congolese army officers and politicians also profited illegally from the mines.
John Numbi, a general who, under Kabila, was, at least publicly, one of Gédéon’s chief antagonists, often got blamed. “I can tell you that Gédéon is not in any mine,” Numbi told me from exile somewhere in southern Africa in 2023 (he had fallen out with Félix Tshisekedi, Kabila’s successor). “I know Gédéon well.” He said that he himself had not profited from the illegal export of minerals, but he pointed a finger at other figures in the Congolese government for taking advantage of the situation.
Between 2002 and 2006, Gédéon’s men progressively became more and more violent, battling rival militias and carving out of northern Katanga an area that was known as the “Triangle of Death.” The group was estimated to be around two thousand fighters strong at its height. UN peacekeepers were deployed; Numbi and the Congolese army ran a brutal counterinsurgency campaign; and Gédéon’s militia killed and tortured people. Gédéon and his men were accused of cannibalism and mystical practices. Eva Gilliam—an information assistant with the UN who at the time witnessed the disarmament of Mai-Mai fighters in the area where Gédéon operated—remembered the significance of the gris-gris for the fighters. “We would arrive for disarmament ceremonies by helicopter, in the bush, maybe in a mud hut, and they would be there,” she told me when we spoke in 2022. “They sometimes had human fingers and ears hanging from their necklaces.” The UN report she authored at the time reports that she was told fighters would “nibble pieces of flesh” during combat, although she noted that the specter of cannibalism was also a perfect boogeyman to scare people away from an area rich in minerals. An estimated 165,000 residents of the Triangle of Death fled their homes.
* * *
Despite the violence—or perhaps because it diverted attention away from more mundane matters, like business—people in the highest echelons were profiting. So too were businessmen like Dan Gertler. In public, the Israeli businessman hailed Kabila’s efforts to run the country. “He’s the most promising new president in the world—a new Mandela,” he told Newsweek in 2003. But Gertler also began to use the same kind of language to describe himself: “I should get a Nobel Prize,” Gertler would tell journalists from Bloomberg in 2012. “They need people like us, who come and put billions in the ground. Without this, the resources are worth nothing.”
By 2006, with Congo lurching toward presidential elections, a pattern emerged: Key assets, including mines, were being sold at bargain prices to fund political activity by the ruling party. Congo planned to hold its first democratic multiparty presidential vote in four decades (Mobutu Sese Seko used to run himself as the only candidate). The elections were blisteringly expensive for everyone involved: The bill for the vote came to around $500 million, almost half of which was funded by the European Union and its member states, making Congo’s elections the costliest in African history. They were expensive for the candidates too: Kabila needed money, and Gertler was an instrument for procuring cash. Shortly before the elections, an American diplomatic officer cabled Washington from the embassy in Kinshasa: “Key political and economic actors are currently dismantling Gecamines [sic] to assert control over the mining sector and reduce Gecamines’ political influence in Katanga and in the DRC generally. Proposed joint-ventures—with Dan Gertler International, Group Forrest and Phelps Dodge—would take the most valuable of Gecamines assets and leave the company with few options for further development.” At the center of this web of transactions was Katumba. Michael J. Kavanagh, a journalist for Bloomberg who has assiduously followed the twists and turns of the Gertler story, has written that the Israeli businessman used his connections with Katumba to horn in on the best deals.
Then, just before the 2011 elections, Bloomberg reported, Gertler bought five mining ventures at below-market prices from state enterprises and sold them, at least in three instances, for a hefty profit. The implication was that Gertler was involved in “grabbing and flipping” mines, as the Mail & Guardian, a South African paper, put it. He would then funnel the money back into Kabila’s purse, and the president would spend it on his costly reelection campaigns. (Gertler vigorously denied these stories at the time they were published.)
In private, however, Gertler would represent himself as uniquely powerful, the only person who could get things done in a chaotic country. The Israeli businessman began to live, as he described it, “the Congolese way.” During the arbitration with the Gertner brothers, Gertler at one point turned on a lawyer who was questioning him. “My power in Congo is that my word is my bond,” Gertler said. “You don’t know what trouble is…. Do you know what it’s like to deal with a chief who has to support ten thousand families, each with five children, people who are hungry for fufu, the local food there? You’ll never understand that.” Gertler boasted to the lawyer, “I am a king in Congo to this day.”
Investors keen on gaining exposure to the world copper market were given road shows: Meetings with Gertler and George Forrest in Europe were followed by junkets to Congo, where the investors would fly into the country for the day, then tour a mine where they would be sold on “very good mineralization” and how they could “create value for the shareholders”—and profit for themselves. One such junket would be shown in the 2009 film Katanga Business, by the Belgian documentarian Thierry Michel. Such visits to “assets” were considered normal occurrences in the world of globalized finance (not dissimilar to the visit to Tesla that the New York bank had arranged). And, because finance had linked asset management firms with pension funds, the financiers might not just be investing the money of the wealthy but also their retirement savings.
A London financier who went on some of the junkets and began investing in Congolese mining, including in a Gertler-linked project near Kolwezi during the mid-2000s, told me that he had been looking for a risky investment that might make him and his firm big money. From the early stages, the financier sensed that things in Congo were not as stable as his interlocutors had promised him. “I think we always managed to go in and out on a day trip and so, you know, deliberately avoid spending the night in Congo,” he told me in 2024.
The financier invested in a mine named Mukondo, expecting a healthy profit, but things soon started to go wrong. The name Dan Gertler often came up; it was he, the financier was told, who was using his political connections to create problems at the mine. Problems that only he could fix—for a price. “We all knew he was a scumbag,” the financier said. “He was someone who was malevolent.”
At one point, as his investment crumbled in value, the financier went to visit Gertler in his suite at the Ritz in London. A fund manager accompanied the financier to the meeting and remembered large sums of money being discussed. The meeting with Gertler was contentious, the financier recalled. “He oozed evil.”
* * *
Among the deployers of foreign capital eager to invest in the boom years before the 2008 financial crisis was the giant New York hedge fund Och-Ziff. Before a U.S. court, it would later plead guilty to paying bribes in several African countries, including Congo. In the documents that emerged after Och-Ziff pleaded guilty was the allegation that the fund had used a foreign “agent” to funnel at least $21.5 million to an unnamed Congolese official whose detailed résumé matched Katumba’s.
The “agent,” on the other hand, was a fixer whom the U.S. Justice Department described only as an “Israeli businessman” with significant interests in Congo’s copper and diamond mining sectors. Subsequently, media outlets and NGOs identified the “agent” as Dan Gertler, and a subsequent civil lawsuit in the Southern District of New York named him explicitly. (Gertler has denied paying bribes in Congo.)
