Massacre à BENI Les FARDC dans le box des accusés MUNDOS & Cie Pas de ...

Pourquoi le Gouvernement de la RDC s'est-il vite empressé d'inventer des Djihadistes ??
Réponse :
Les reporters de France 24 se sont rendus compte que les massacres étaient aussi perpétrés par certains FARDC et non par des Djihadistes.
Certains hauts gradés entre autres, MUNDOS, Tango Four, des Majors des FARDC, se livrent à des trafics juteux dans la région.
Ces faits sont connus du gouvernement de la RDC.
Ces hauts gradés louent les services de rebelles pour leurs basses besognes, entre autres, massacrer des Congolais témoins ou gênant pour leur trafic. La région DOIT se vider de ses habitants !
Le Gouvernement de la RDC ayant eu vent que des reporters de France 24 étaient sur le terrain s’est vite empressé d’inventer de FAUX Djihadistes.
Lambert Mende Porte-Parole du gouvernement a fait des communiqués dans ce sens mais la Communauté Internationale et les spécialistes du terrain RDC comme Jason Stearns ou encore Ida Sawyer, des ONG’s confirment qu’il N’y a PAS de Djihadistes en RDC. !
Raison pour laquelle Jason Stearns et Ida Sawyer ont été expulsé de la RDC = Témoins gênants.
La Monusco est gênée de la situation et ne sait quoi faire ! Elle avoue à demi-mots.
Ceux qui savaient comme Mamadou Ndala a été assassiné …..
Le dossier est à la CPI !

The richest, riskiest tin mine on Earth

Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The richest, riskiest tin mine on Earth

28/08/2016

Can an ambitious mine make a difference in eastern Congo?

More than a river to cross

DEEP in the jungle of North Kivu, a lawless province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a new road is being cut through the canopy. As birds chirp, hand saws cut noisily through trees. Men with shovels dig out roots and flatten the ochre-red earth. A sturdy new log bridge crosses a stream. On it stands Boris Kamstra, a South African in a plaid shirt and bucket hat. “This is great road-building material,” he booms, gesturing at the stones.

Mr Kamstra is the boss of Alphamin Resources, a Canadian-funded company that is trying to build perhaps the most improbable mine in Africa. The site, on a hill called Bisie, is about 60km (37 miles) from the nearest settlement of any size, a town called Walikale. Before Alphamin arrived there was no road connection: anyone hoping to reach it faced a full day’s hike. Getting to Goma, the nearest border crossing, would take another two days on a road lorries cannot use. In the immediate area are three armed rebel groups. The nearest government post is at Walikale—and consists of one rather squat office.

Congo’s soil is bursting with buried treasure. Its long civil war, which ravaged the east for the best part of a decade, was financed largely by metals extracted from hills like Bisie (seearticle). Congo’s tin, tantalum and tungsten are used in electronics around the world. Although some of these minerals come from big industrial copper mines in Katanga, Congo’s south, and a gold mine in South Kivu, there is not yet a single modern mine in North Kivu.

Tin, tin in the Congo

Until now the province’s metal has been dug out almost entirely by hand. Yet Alphamin hopes to show that it can run a modern industrial mine in a part of the world that scares other modern miners away.

Alphamin says that the investment is attractive—even at a time of low commodity prices—because the ore that it plans to extract is richer than that found anywhere else in the world. Behind the company’s camp on the hill are stacks of carefully ordered cylinders of rock drilled out to map the riches beneath the mountain. (Like almost everything else in the camp, the drill rig had to be lifted in by helicopter.) The ore they contain is 4.5% grade. That means that for every 100 tonnes of ore extracted, the firm will be able to sell 3.25 tonnes of tin (not all the tin can be extracted from the rock). Most other mines would be happy to produce 0.7 tonnes.

Such a rich deposit ought to make Bisie a very cheap producer, but its advantages are offset by the other costs and risks of working in eastern Congo. These are hefty, even before the first load of tin has been extracted. The helicopter “makes confetti of $100 bills”, jokes Mr Kamstra. Exploratory drilling costs more still (roughly $250 for every metre, of which the company has drilled 40,000 to prove to investors that it has lots of tin in the ground). Building a new road 32km through the bush is not cheap: it involves 450 workers. The firm is also rehabilitating an existing road to Goma so that it can carry lorries.

Once exploration is completed it will take some $135m to build the mine. Recouping that investment may not be easy in a place as insecure as North Kivu. Congolese authorities granted a permit for exploratory drilling in 2006. But the firm was not able to operate until 2012 because there was too much fighting nearby. Since then its base camp has been attacked by armed groups four times. In 2014 a police officer was killed and research work worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was wrecked. The camp now has 30 police officers living on site. UN peacekeeping helicopters sometimes keep a watchful eye on it, too.

If the gamble pays off Alphamin’s investors will make juicy returns. But to do so they may have to convince locals that the project is in their interest. If not, they risk protests and sabotage.

In 2007 some 18,000 people lived at Bisie, working the site with pickaxes and shovels. They produced some 14,000 tonnes of tin that year—or perhaps 5% of world production. To get it to market people carried concentrated ore on their heads through the jungle to an airstrip where small planes could land to carry it out. It was back-breaking work but lucrative for many Congolese. That era began to come to an end in 2011, thanks in part to an American law.

Under the Dodd-Frank act, a law aimed mainly at tightening bank regulation, firms operating in the United States must be able to show where the minerals used in their products came from. The idea was to stop rebels in poor countries from selling gold and diamonds to fund wars. The law all but shut down artisanal mining in much of eastern Congo.

Elsewhere in eastern Congo artisanal mines have gradually reopened thanks to a verification scheme under which the UN and the government check mines and allow certified ones to “tag and bag” minerals. The site at Bisie has, however, never been certified. And although Alphamin will provide some well-paid jobs to locals, as well as pay taxes to the central government, its mechanised operations will never employ anything like the thousands of people who once toiled there with pick and shovel. Alphamin has promised to fund local projects, such as a new school, that are intended to benefit 44 villages.

The mine could help local people indirectly, too, by bankrolling a cash-strapped government. When production begins a truck carrying tin ore will rattle every day from Bisie towards Goma. Each one will pay both a toll for the road as well as royalties to the provincial government. For the first time, the government will have a financial incentive (and some revenue) to provide security in the area. Insecurity is not just the biggest threat to Alphamin’s investors; it is also the biggest cause of suffering to the locals.

In much of Africa having natural resources has often proved to be a curse. Gems and minerals have funded rebel armies and kept conflicts burning. Governments that can raise big bucks from oil or mineral royalties, rather than by fostering broad-based growth and taxing people’s incomes, have had little incentive to govern well. The ruling class have devoted their energies to divvying up the easy money rather than actually governing.

In eastern Congo the state has all but collapsed, leaving vast tracts of territory lawless. The locals have discovered that even bad government is better than no government at all. It will take more than a tin mine to change that, but you have to start somewhere.

The Economist

Democratic Republic of Congo city poisoned by years of mining

Democratic Republic of Congo city poisoned by years of mining

22/08/2016

Lubumbashi – "In this stream, the fish vanished long ago, killed by acids and waste from the mines," says Lubumbashi resident Heritier Maloba, staring into the murky waters of his childhood fishing hole.

Pollution caused by copper and cobalt mining has not only poisoned the Katapula, a tributary of the mighty Congo River and one of the main waterways in this second city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but has also induced widespread illness.

File photo showing a child and a woman breaking rocks 

extracted from a cobalt mine at a copper quarry and

 cobalt pit in Lubumbashi, DR Congo.

"High concentrations of toxic metals ... cause respiratory disorders and birth defects," particularly in people living near the mines, said toxicologist Celestin Banza of the University of Lubumbashi.

The damage has spread through acids in untreated waste released into nature, polluting the air, the water, and much of Lubumbashi, a city of more than two million residents in the country's southeast.

Until recently, Lubumbashi was the capital of Katanga province whose fabulous copper wealth was first tapped by Belgian colonists early in the 20th century.

Last year, Katanga was divided into four new provinces. Mining is prevalent in the two southern ones.

Hindered by neglect during the regime of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (1965-1997) and in the second Congolese war (1998-2003), the mining industry rose from the ashes of devastating conflict.

Between 2010 and 2014, mineral production led strong economic growth and lifted the country up to the rank of the world's fifth copper producer and top producer of cobalt.

With demand for cobalt driven by its use in mobile phones and electric car batteries, the trade has come at a dire environmental and health cost for DR Congo.

'Lack of expertise'

"Mining pollution in Katanga is an undeniable reality," admits member of parliament Davon N'Sa Mputu Elima, who served as environment minister in 2012-14.

He says that mining firms put up considerable resistance to a 2009 amendment in the country's environmental code, which imposed stringent new health and safety requirements.

Such protective measures are often not enforced because of what the MP calls "a lack of expertise" among administrative officials responsible for seeing that mining firms comply.

The public health risks listed by Banza, the toxicologist, also include metabolic disorders, certain tumours, burning sensations in the eyes and the throat, and even "short-term sterility".

"You get the feeling you're suffocating as you breathe," says Viviane Kibwe, a mother of four in a city where mining installations can be located close by people's homes, schools and fields.

Plumes of smoke and clouds of dust rise into the air carrying dangerous particles, while used water containing cleaning chemicals and mineral alloys runs off untreated into streams.

A 2012 toxicology study by the Carter Centre found that many ailments in the area are indeed the result of prolonged exposure to harmful chemicals.

The foundation set up by US former president Jimmy Carter in 1982 also criticised "several flaws" and "ambiguity" with regard to the treatment of waste in DR Congo's mining code of 2002.

Eric Monga, chairman of the Katanga branch of the Business Federation of the Congo, counters that sustainable and safe mining practices have become "an ethical rule" observed by companies.

"An approved study on the environmental impact is a requirement before any operations," he says.

Yet Belgian and Congolese experts carrying out health studies since 2008 find that concentrations of cobalt, copper, lead and even uranium in urine samples "largely exceeded the reference values accepted by the World Health Organisation," Banza says.

This is particularly true among children, according to the professor.

'Nothing has grown'

At the Shinkolobwe mine some 150km northwest of Lubumbashi – the source of the uranium used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb – thousands of people worked for many years without the slightest protection.

Banza told AFP that he plans to publish a new public health report demonstrating that people in the south of the former Katanga are far worse affected by breathing difficulties than people in the north, mainly farmland.

"My colleagues and I have recorded a comeback of cardiac and respiratory diseases, [particularly] among children and women," says Jean-Marie Kazadi, senior medical expert for the new Haut-Katanga and Lualaba provinces.

Yet many thousands of people work arduous shifts in the mines, desperate to make a living in conditions worsened by a global tumble in copper prices.

The high price of mining is also evident at Kipushi, about 30km south of Lubumbashi, where savannah abruptly gives way to a broad strip of scorched, barren land where the state mining firm Gécamines used to dump acidic waste.

"For more than 30 years, nothing has grown in this place," says 76-year-old Mwalimu Kasongo, a retired teacher.

Former minister N'Sa Mputu says several bird species that once thrived in the area have now "disappeared".

For Lubumbashi resident Maloba, now an unemployed man in his 30s, the childhood fishing expeditions remain a distant memory, with little hope of ever catching anything more in his beloved river.

AFP

‘BLOCKBUSTER’ FUNDING FOR UK INVESTIGATION IS A STEP TOWARDS JUSTICE IN CONGO’S SECRETIVE MINING SALES SCANDAL

‘BLOCKBUSTER’ FUNDING FOR UK INVESTIGATION IS A STEP TOWARDS JUSTICE IN CONGO’S SECRETIVE MINING SALES SCANDAL

16/08/2016

Several months before a contentious Presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011 a state mining company transferred, on the orders of the government, $10 million into an election fund. 

The millions were part of the proceeds from a secretive sale by the state miner of rich copper mines to offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands linked to Dan Gertler, a close friend of the incumbent President Kabila. Kabila went on to win that election which was marred by violence, claims of ballot stuffing and intimidation of the opposition. 

This is one episode in a spate of six secretive mining and oil sales that lost Congo $1.5 billion – an astronomical figure in a country where nearly two out of ten babies die before their fifth birthday and six out of ten children are not in school. Global Witness has been reporting on the corruption risks in the deals since 2012.

The UK played a crucial role in the scandal. The offshore companies got the assets at a fraction of their true value and then often sold them on to or entered into deals with London-listed mining giants ENRC (Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation) and Glencore. The deal which led to the $10m election fund contribution involved a mine that, just a little over a year later, would be bought by ENRC. Due to secrecy laws in the British Virgin Islands the ultimate beneficiaries of the deals are still unknown. 

From here the plot thickened. ENRC called in US lawyers Dechert to do an independent investigation into bribery allegations in its African and Kazakhstani operations, which included the Congo deals, and then fired them. A leaked presentation by the lawyers reportedly claimed that Dechert's investigations were hampered by employees of ENRC who forged documents, gave the investigators the “wrong computer” and set up a “false office”. ENRC are now suing Dechert for overcharging on the investigation in a case being held in secret. 

CONGO'S SECRETIVE DEALS: VALUE VS PRICE PAID (US$)

In 2013 the UK’s Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into “allegations of fraud, bribery and corruption” at the company, with a focus on the Congolese secretive sales.  Later that same year, ENRC delisted from the London Stock Exchange with its shares worth less than half the price investors, including pension funds, paid at its initial public offering six years earlier. 

Fast-forward to 2016 and the Financial Times reports that the Serious Fraud Office has been granted extra ring-fenced funding to pursue its three-year old ENRC probe. The so-called “blockbuster” funding is reserved for investigations set to consume more than 10 per cent of the SFO’s £33m budget. This new investigative funding signals a major step towards justice for some of those potentially responsible for London’s role in the secret sales scandal, something Global Witness has long campaigned for. 

Global Witness is calling for further investigations to be opened into other companies who have entered into deals with Gertler companies for similar mining assets, such as London-listed Glencore. ENRC – which now operates as ERG, Eurasian Resources Group – has previously denied any wrongdoing and has said it “is resolutely opposed to bribery and corruption in whatever form it may take.” Glencore and Gertler also both deny any wrongdoing.

In Congo another election is due at the end of the year. This one is even more contentious as opponents of President Kabila accuse him of trying to sidestep a constitutional rule limiting the top job to two terms. The space for independent voices within the country is fast closing. Just last week the Congolese government forced Human Rights Watch’s longstanding Congo-based researcher Ida Sawyer out of the country.

Another worrying trend, as we reported in May, is the uptick in new unannounced sales of mining assets ahead of the election that risk illicitly financing the poll. The contracts for these new deals must be published, as Congolese law requires, in order to allay concerns that assets are again being sold in suspicious circumstances on the cheap with the proceeds failing to benefit the Congolese people. 

The SFO investigation into ENRC can help draw a line under one part of the scandal. It can also set an important precedent for the players and facilitators of these secretive mining deals based in London and the British Virgin Islands. 

Global Witness

Ivanhoe Says Congo Copper Find May Be Africa’s Most Notable

Ivanhoe Says Congo Copper Find May Be Africa’s Most Notable

11/08/2016

Results from drilling at a copper deposit in the Democratic Republic of Congo being explored by Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. show what may prove to be the most significant discovery of the metal in Africa, the company said.

The find at Kakula, in the southern portion of Ivanhoe’s Kamoa project, is “enormous,” Ivanhoe Mines DRC Managing Director Louis Watum said at a conference in the capital, Kinshasa. Discussions are under way on how to adjust the development strategy to allocate sufficient funds to bring the new discovery into production as soon as possible, he said in an interview afterward.

“Earlier discoveries already have established Kamoa as the world’s largest, undeveloped, high-grade copper discovery,” Chief Executive Officer Robert Friedland said in a separate statement. Kakula “could prove to be Africa’s most significant copper discovery,” he said.

Under the current plans, the original Kamoa discovery would move to production in the final quarter of 2018. Ivanhoe still has to finalize the terms under which it will increase the government’s stake in the project from 5 to 20 percent.

Congo last year blocked the sale by Ivanhoe of 49.5 percent in the Kamoa project to China’s Zijin Mining. The government lifted its objection in September, in return for an additional 15 percent in the local operating company Kamoa Copper SA.

Zijin completed the acquisition in December, although terms for the increase in the state’s participation still haven’t been agreed. Negotiations are ongoing and a positive outcome is expected soon, Watum said.

By Thomas Wilson

Bloomberg

Read also: Update DRC Projects: KAMOA & KIPUSHI – production under constraining environment/ http://www.miningreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Ivanhoe-Mines.pdf

DRC’s largest mine was just sold. And DRC got nothing.

DRC’s largest mine was just sold. And DRC got nothing.

03/08/2016

An open pit at the Tenke Fungurume mine. Freeport-McMoRan

 Inc. The largest copper mine in the Democratic 

Republic of Congo.

And sales like these are much more common (and legal) than you might imagine.

Kathleen Brophy is a Research Assistant for Extractive Industries at Oxfam America.

Last week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists unveiled a collection of new stories in their latest Panama Papers leak, this time with a focus on Africa. The stories reveal new details about illicit financial flows and the extractive industries, showing how multi-billion dollar oil and mining deals across the continent serve to make the rich even richer while providing no benefits to some of the world’s poorest populations.

So what exactly does this mean? How is it that billions of dollars are being made off of Africa’s natural resources without benefitting African populations? For multinational oil and mineral companies the answer is simple: separate the actual from the transactional.

In early May, mining giant Freeport McMoRan finalized a deal with China Molybdenum Inc. (CMOC) to sell the company’s controlling stake in the Tenke Fungurume copper mine in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the company’s largest copper mine in Africa. Freeport sold their 56 percent stake in the Congolese project for $2.65 billion.

At a glance, it would seem that everybody wins in Tenke’s recent sale. Freeport offloads the asset in an effort to reduce the company’s global $21 billion debt bill. CMOC acquires the valuable asset, adding a critical component to the company’s growing portfolio. And what about DRC? The country certainly has a lot to gain from the sale considering that Tenke is the single largest private investment in the country’s history and accounts for 3 to 4 percent of the country’s total GDP.

One might expect that the sale of such a huge asset would surely benefit the country. Since the physical assets worth billions of dollars in copper reserves sits within DRC’s borders, one would assume that the country would be involved in the deal, and gain a healthy slice of capital gains tax, for example.

But the Government of DRC knew nothing about it until after it happened – despite their 20 percent stake in the project.

When asked about the government’s position on the transaction, Minister of Mines Martin Kabwelulu questioned the opacity of the sale, adding that there must be a tax on the sale of the Congolese asset and that they will push the tax authority to claim it. But this tax may be more difficult to claim than they think.  And while billions of dollars transfer between the two companies’ bank accounts, the citizens of DRC may not see a penny from the two billion dollar sale.

This is because Freeport did not sell the Tenke Fungurume copper mine.

Freeport sold its interests in a company called TF Holdings Limited, a Bermuda holding company that indirectly owns an 80 percent interest in Tenke Fungurume Mining SA. Freeport has a 70 percent interest in TF Holdings—an effective 56 percent interest in Tenke Fungurume Mining SA. Therefore, CMOC is acquiring this indirect stake through purchase of shares in a Bermuda holding company. To be exact, a subsidiary of CMOC will acquire the stake, according to the company’s press release on the deal.

To you and I, the complexity may not make sense. The sale of a mine should seem straightforward enough. Why are there so many layers of complication? Why doesn’t the transaction reflect the basic facts of the sale?

According to the rules of the game for multinational finance, financial transactions often reflect little to nothing about the reality of the sale. In the case of Tenke, the sale of rights to extract billions of dollars of copper from beneath Congo’s soil has been made as a foreign transaction, occurring between offshore subsidiaries thousands of miles from the mine site. This sort of deal is hardly unprecedented. Multinational extractive companies operate in complex webs of hundreds, sometimes thousands of subsidiaries around the world. These subsidiaries exist to serve a number of purposes, from neutral to illicit. But this complex corporate structuring can sometimes affect tax liability, as Oxfam recently examined in a report on the use of tax havens by multinational oil companies operating in Kenya.

Whatever their purpose, subsidiaries play an important role in frequently divorcing the financial transactions of a company from their actual economic activity. Thus in the Tenke deal, the financial transaction takes place in a remote and indirect way, completely financially detached from the  mine itself and those it affects.

Such detachment prevents governments from taxing these transactions, even though they may reflect economic activity that may normally be considered taxable. So even though Freeport sold the mine to CMOC, since Freeport sold an indirect stake in the mine through the sale of shares in a Bermuda holding company, it will be much harder for the government of DRC to levy a capital gains tax on the sale.

While nothing in this case signals malicious activity or that Freeport was intentionally avoiding a capital gains tax payment to DRC, that sort of action is not unheard of. The fact that everything the companies did was likely all legal makes it even more troubling.

There are a number of international efforts seeking to curb to curb exploitation of tax loopholes and the abuse of tax havens. In the US, Oxfam advocates for the passage of the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act which would impose strict rules for corporate financing on US-based companies in an attempt to limit the use of certain aggressive tax planning strategies. Oxfam also encourages private-sector leadership on the issue, urging multinational corporations to adopt “responsible tax behavior” as explained in a recent Oxfam discussion paper with Action Aid and Christian Aid.   Oxfam is also currently exploring ways to support civil society engagement on these issues in DRC itself.

The way that major assets change hands is an issue of critical importance, especially as multinational companies continue to react to the commodity price downturn by unloading assets. Companies like Freeport will be forced to shed assets in multi-billion dollar sales. Through a multitude of local and international efforts, Oxfam and partners work to ensure that governments receive due tax payments and no longer watch from the sidelines as companies make billions through far away deals.

Oxfam America