Data leak reveals how Chinese money flowed to Joseph Kabila

• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Michael Kavanagh and William Clowes
• Publication title: Business Day: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa)

"The account has finally been emptied," Yvon Douhore, head of an inhouse audit team in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), wrote in an email that day, July 5 2018, after noticing the withdrawal. "I'm at a loss for words," a colleague replied the next day.

The previous month, Groupe BGFIBank's compliance department in DRC had frozen accounts held by the businessman's firm, Congo Construction Company (CCC) because the client file was missing key documents, according to bank records. A history of transactions reviewed by Bloomberg News as part of the biggest leak of financial information from Africa showed an even bigger issue: its political connections.

Over a fiveyear period, tens of millions of dollars flowed through CCC's accounts to people and companies closely associated with DRC's thenpresident, Joseph Kabila, all at a bank partly owned by his sister and run by his brother, Selemani Francis Mtwale.

But a series of scandals had forced the lender's parent company in Gabon to reconsider its embrace of the presidential family. It removed Selemani as CEO in May 2018 and then reclaimed a 40% stake held by Kabila's sister, for which it said she'd never paid.

Douhore's colleagues blocked the accounts while he conducted an autopsy of Selemani's tenure. Yet someone at the bank was still authorising transactions, right through to the final $2.5m cash withdrawal in July 2018. The documents hint at why: Douhore was witnessing the closing act of CCC's secret role as an intermediary between Chinese mining groups and the Kabila clan.

For more than six months, Bloomberg has analysed a trove of 3.5million bank documents from BGFI that offer an unprecedented glimpse into how several individuals and companies operated in what would turn out to be a takeover of much of the Congolese mining industry by Chinese companies during Kabila's presidency. The information was obtained by Parisbased anticorruption group Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa and the French news organisation Mediapart and shared with media outlets coordinated by the European Investigative Collaborations network and five nongovernmental organisations.

The consortium's investigations, called "Congo Holdup", demonstrate the extent to which the country's most powerful family used the bank to serve its private interests and how at least $138m in state funds transited BGFI to Kabila's relatives and associates. The new information also casts a light on some of the previously unseen ways in which Chinese companies came to dominate the mineral riches of one of the poorest nations in the world.

The Sentry, a Washingtonbased anticorruption group, used the banking data to write a report about the Kabila family's financial ties to Chinese mining companies. Bloomberg was given access to the organisation's documents and findings before the report's release. Over the course of several months, Bloomberg independently obtained additional documents and spoke with dozens of people on five continents to confirm and complement the information.

In a statement posted on its website on November 23, after the first consortium stories appeared, BGFI said that while it decried the leak and questioned the authenticity of the documents, it "strongly condemns acts contrary to law and ethics that may have been committed in the past within its BGFIBank RDC subsidiary and of which its employees could possibly have been perpetrators or complicit."

The bank added that it had restructured its ownership of the DRC unit in 2018, conducted an internal audit to identify methods that may have been used to circumvent controls, put in new management and filed a complaint with the prosecutor's office to determine who was responsible for the alleged acts and sanction them.

This isn't the first time BGFI has been at the centre of corruption allegations in the DRC. Five years ago, a former compliance officer shared thousands of bank documents with media outlets including Bloomberg that showed how Selemani had directed millions of...