Aug 27 (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo's government is reviewing its $6 billion "infrastructure-for-minerals" deal with Chinese investors as part of a broader examination of mining contracts, Finance Minister Nicolas Kazadi told Reuters.

President Felix Tshisekedi said in May that some mining contracts could be reviewed because of concerns they are not sufficiently benefiting Congo, which is the world's largest producer of cobalt and Africa's leading miner of copper.

His government announced this month it had formed a commission to reassess the reserves and resources at China Molybdenum's (603993.SS) massive Tenke Fungurume copper and cobalt mine in order to "fairly lay claim to (its) rights".

Kazadi said in an interview that the 2007 deal agreed with Chinese state-owned firms Sinohydro Corp (SINOH.UL) and China Railway Group Limited (601390.SS) was also being reviewed to ensure it is "fair" and "effective".

Sinohydro and China Railway did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Elie Tshinguli, deputy director-general of the Sicomines copper and cobalt joint venture in Congo, majority-owned by Sinohydro and China Railway, did not respond to a request for comment.

Under the deal struck with the government of Tshisekedi's predecessor, Joseph Kabila, Sinohydro and China Railway agreed to build roads and hospitals in exchange for a 68% stake in the Sicomines venture.

The deal formed a key part of Kabila's development plan for the country, but critics say few of the promised infrastructure projects have been fully realised and have complained about a lack of transparency.

"We saw that there were some governance issues in the past," said Kazadi. "We needed more clarity on the contract, the kind of finance that is behind (the) investment."

He said the reviews were "not a matter of threatening any investors" and that the government was conducting the review "in close partnership with the Chinese themselves".

Chinese investors control about 70% of Congo's mining sector, according to Congo's chamber of mines, after snapping up lucrative projects from Western companies in recent years.

After Tshisekedi announced the reviews in May, a move attributed by some analysts to Western pressure to go after Chinese companies, China's ambassador to Congo warned the country "must not be a battlefield between major powers".

Asked at an online briefing about the formation of a government commission to reassess reserves, the chairman of China Molybdenum, Yuan Honglin, said communication between Tenke Fungurume and Congo's state-owned mining company Gecamines, its minority partner at the mine, was going according to plan.

"Both parties are confident to properly resolve the problem within the framework agreement," the chairman said.

IMF deal

Kazadi also provided new details in follow-up comments to Reuters on Friday about changes to Congo's contract with Dubai state-owned port operator DP World for the development of the deep sea Banana Port on the Atlantic coast.

DP World said in May that the contract had been amended but did not disclose what the amendments were.

Kazadi said the state's share in the project, whose cost is estimated at over $1 billion, had increased from 30% to 34% and the royalty rate to be paid to Congo increased from 5% to 15%.

The deal was signed in 2018 but construction has yet to begin.

In addition, Kazadi said he expected the International Monetary Fund's review next month of the $1.5 billion three-year programme for Congo, that received final approval in July, to confirm all the conditions had been met.

"There is no doubt that the review should be successful and will lead to a new disbursement in December," he said, adding the next disbursement of just over $200 million would be used to bolster foreign currency reserves.

Meanwhile the government plans to use half of the 1021.7 million Special Drawing Rights ($1.45 billion) - the IMF's own currency - allocated to Congo to further shore up reserves, he said.

A big chunk of the remainder will be used to launch an investment fund aimed at diversifying Congo's economy, he said.

"It will implement new projects in new kinds of areas, like agriculture or energy production," said Kazadi.

As the midday heat begins to subside in the coastal city of Pointe-Noire in Republic of the Congo, eight sinewy fishermen shunt a rickety pirogue toward the gray Atlantic beneath a brooding sky. As they dig their feet into the sand, a tattered Congolese flag flutters above the bow in the breeze. It’s good weather for shark fishing. “We are like soldiers who have taken the oath,” says Alain Pangou, the crew’s 54-year-old captain, a short man with angular features and a penchant for poetic turns of phrase. “What choice do we have but to go and fight?”

When they reach the water, the fishermen spring into the boat with an almost balletic grace. I flop clumsily into the hull after them. Our pilot, Gabi, who has a bent cigarette hanging from his bottom lip and wears a thick beanie despite the equatorial climate, throws me a disparaging glance. He slaps the side of the small outboard engine when it issues an initial sputter of protest, then opens it up to a high-pitched wail, and we pull away from the shoreline. Pangou, who instantly looks more at home at sea than he did on land, cracks open a bottle of beer and drains it in a few gulps. Then he sprawls across a pile of drift nets to rest before the long night of fishing ahead.

A former engineer for an Angolan oil group, Pangou lost his job when the company pulled out of Congo at the outset of the country’s first civil war in 1993. The year-long conflict claimed 2,000 lives; 14,000 Congolese died during a second civil war that broke out just a few years later, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced. In a desperate economic climate, Pangou, like countless others, saw the sea as his only viable alternative. “I couldn’t just fold my arms and do nothing,” he says. “I had a family to feed.”

He worked first as an itinerant crew member, and eventually established himself as a dependable and unflappable captain for hire. Initially, like most artisanal fishers in Congo (artisanal, in the Congolese context, means low-tech), Pangou fished for sardinella, small sardine-like fish found and consumed in abundance as a staple throughout western and central African countries.

Historically, the only Congolese who harvested sharks were the Vili, a minority coastal ethnic group that subsisted on the meat. Yet, in the 1980s, migrant fishers from West African countries, especially Benin, had begun to target sharks in Congo’s waters to supply fins to visiting Chinese oil industry workers. Back in China, a burgeoning middle class in a post-liberalization economy was fueling demand for shark fin soup, a status dish. That appetite also sparked a local export industry in Pointe-Noire: West African middlemen purchased fins from fishmongers (who bought the sharks whole from migrant fishermen) and smuggled them through Congolese customs, shipping them to Hong Kong and, reputedly, mainland China.

As Congo’s economy continued to free fall in the years following the first civil war, the drastic devaluation of the CFA franc, the local currency, effectively doubled the price of fins. Pangou and other Congolese artisanal fishermen saw opportunity. They gradually began to target sharks in addition to sardinella.

Then, another seismic shift. Shortly after Congo’s second civil war subsided in 1999, Chinese industrial trawlers began arriving off the coast of Pointe-Noire, the country’s primary fishing hub, with the encouragement of the revenue-hungry Congolese government, heralding a further boom in the shark-fishing industry. Industrial fleets are not licensed to target sharks in Congo, but artisanal fishers can, and they now had a new market to serve—workers on the Chinese boats also wanted fins.

In recent years, demand for fins in China has dropped by around 80 percent, but is growing in other Asian countries including Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Studies suggest that the fin trade still accounts for a significant proportion of the estimated 70 to 100 million sharks fished globally each year. However, Congo’s sharks have been increasingly fished for sustenance, too. Artisanal fishers say that the poorly regulated industrial trawlers have depleted other staple fish stocks—particularly the sardinella, but also pelagic species including tuna, hairtail, and cutlassfish—leaving sharks as a substitute for their fleet of approximately 700 boats. As a result, although cured or smoked shark meat has long been a feature of the Congolese coastal diet, it has become both more ubiquitous and more sought after in bustling urban markets and traditional Congolese restaurants as a cheaper alternative to other fish. “It’s now consumed all over the country, not only in Pointe-Noire,” says Jean-Michel Dziengue, a Congolese fisheries monitor.

But mounting pressure on shark populations and a dramatically shifting geopolitical landscape now pose considerable threats to Congo’s artisanal shark fishermen, as well as to the expansive network of other Congolese involved in processing and selling the sharks once they’ve made it to land. The COVID-19 pandemic has blocked international trade routes and crippled an already floundering Congolese economy. Meanwhile, a growing number of migrants from across the country and the wider region have been pushed toward the Congolese coast by a combination of climate change and conflict, increasing competition for the country’s already overexploited marine resources. Congo has also continued to attract migrant fishermen from West African countries that have either seen their own fish stocks obliterated or implemented tighter controls in a bid to prevent such an eventuality.

Should Congo’s artisanal shark fishery collapse, the ramifications will reverberate across the country and the region. Given the similarly dire outlook for the sardinella, the vast majority of which is shipped to China for fish meal, the collapse will present not only pressing economic and environmental concerns, but also significant food security risks. In a country where much of the population relies on fish, and increasingly shark in particular, as its primary and often its only source of protein, the health of Congo’s artisanal shark fishery could become a matter of life and death.

For the time being, however, and contrary to a raft of international recommendations from organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), artisanal shark fishing remains functionally unregulated and widely pursued all along Congo’s palm-fringed coastline, a biodiverse and highly productive transition zone between the warm Gulf of Guinea and the cooler waters of southern Africa. An in situ assessment by Traffic, an international wildlife trade monitoring network, showed that in March and April 2019, the peak period for shark fishing, artisanal fishermen from Pointe-Noire were often collectively landing between 400 and 1,000 sharks and rays per day. Meanwhile, data collected by the University of Exeter in England in partnership with the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Congo’s fisheries department between July 2018 and July 2019 suggested a year-round daily average of roughly 100 to 400 sharks and rays.

Though Congo has no official population estimates for fish stocks, both Dziengue and scores of local artisanal fishermen interviewed for this story reiterate that these recent catch estimates represent a significant drop from the industry’s heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s. These fishermen also say they are hauling in significantly fewer large breeding adults than in previous years and that the bulk of their catch is increasingly dominated by small juveniles, a telltale sign that the fishery is unsustainable.

At the same time, according to WCS data, between 2015 and 2017, there was an approximately 84 percent increase in the number of licensed industrial vessels operating off the Congolese coast. There are currently around 110 industrial boats jostling for space in Congo’s 40,000-square-kilometer exclusive economic zone, although the Congolese government says it plans to eventually halve that number. By contrast, Congo’s better-regulated northern neighbor, Gabon, has just 24 registered industrial vessels operating in around 240,000 square kilometers. Theoretically, the first 11 kilometers from the coast of Pointe-Noire, thought to be key shark breeding grounds, are reserved exclusively for artisanal fishing. But testimonies from fishermen and research by WCS indicate that illegal encroachments by industrial trawlers are a routine occurrence.

Congo’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries concedes that industrial trawlers are likely “accidentally” catching sharks themselves, which they are permitted to claim as by-catch, in addition to the staple stocks they’re licensed to fish. Congo doesn’t collect data on the number or species of sharks caught as by-catch, but in Gabon, a government program that tracked 12 industrial tuna vessels between June 2017 and January 2018 found that they “accidentally” caught 2,053 fish and other marine animals from “sensitive” species, which included 1,698 sharks.

“If the scale of the industrial fleet keeps increasing and the volume of artisanal fishers does too, then I can’t see artisanal fishing being sustained at its current level for much longer,” says Kristian Metcalfe, a marine conservation scientist at the University of Exeter who has been working with WCS to assist the Congolese government in implementing more sustainable marine management measures. Using GPS tracking, Metcalfe’s research has also shown that artisanal shark fishermen from Pointe-Noire are having to search ever farther from land, for longer periods, and in deeper waters for their catches—and are facing increasing concomitant risks in the process.

Pangou certainly isn’t oblivious to the potential perils of his work. As we stop to drop anchor around 15 kilometers from shore, with flashes of lightning occasionally illuminating the horizon, he recounts dramatic tales of biblical storms, as well as an incident in which a large and unruly tiger shark he’d hauled into the boat knocked him overboard. There’s something about the momentary role reversal of the shark in the boat and him in the water that particularly tickles him—he repeats this part of the story for good measure. “Back in those days, sharks were everywhere,” he adds with palpable nostalgia as he and the crew begin to let out their long drift nets into the turbid sea.

A little after dawn, the Pointe-Noire Artisanal Fishery Support Centre (CAPAP) on the ramshackle periphery of the city is already a hive of activity. Local rumba music blares through enormous distorting speakers at either end of the facility as fish wholesalers lay out their stock on metal tables. Boxes of juvenile hammerheads are unloaded onto the hot concrete outside as pockets of buyers and fish processors barter vociferously. Nearby, a skinny fishmonger with a piratical gold earring cuts an impressive dorsal fin from an adult tiger shark. He passes it to a squat Senegalese fin trader who drops it into a plastic shopping bag emblazoned with Barack Obama’s smiling face and swiftly departs the scene. He will likely box up hundreds of fins before slipping them through Congo’s customs unchecked, without permits. Like most of the fins that leave CAPAP, they will probably be flown first to Dubai, a major transit point for the international wildlife trade, before eventually reaching East Asia.

A little farther down the beach, a pirogue about the size of a family minivan crewed by eight Beninese migrants returns from a week at sea and begins to unload its catch onto the sand as a crowd of potential customers gathers. There are at least 25 adult sharks, including hammerheads, silkies, duskies, and tigers—some of them are a disconcertingly putrid green having presumably been caught days before—and maybe 100 juveniles, as well as a few threatened rays, whose considerable bulk requires two strong young men to drag them ashore.

As I look on, a man with a graying beard and sage expression approaches and introduces himself as Ivora Boussouhou. “You used to see many more sharks than this,” he tells me, wagging a finger dismissively at the scene in front of us. “When I started fishing at the end of the war, it was a complete massacre at sea,” he adds. “Every boat was bringing in at least 50 big sharks a day. But since 2012, it’s started to reduce. We don’t have a culture of conservation and there are no quotas, so everything is being overfished.” He looks out to sea and absentmindedly pats his rotund belly before lighting a cigarette. “We can’t exist anymore,” he says, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “Ten years from now, you won’t see artisanal fishing in Congo.”

The ramifications of any such doomsday would extend far beyond the fishermen themselves. In addition to their tens of thousands of dependents, there are countless other stakeholders within the value chain of small-scale fishing, including fish processors, the vast majority of whom are women.

“At the moment, things are very hard,” says Justine Tinou as she salts tuna—bought fresh from CAPAP that morning—in a plastic bucket outside her small clapboard home about 10 kilometers inland. As she works, three small butterflied hammerheads are drying on a rack in the hot sun behind her. “They stink,” she says as I inspect them, “but they taste good.” As sharks become scarcer, following the trajectory of other species before them, Tinou says prices have shot up. At the same time, Congo’s latest economic crisis, prompted by falling oil prices and exacerbated by COVID-19, means that she also faces the double threat of fewer customers and rising competition from more and more women entering the processing sector to provide for their struggling families.

The stakes for Tinou’s family are high. Her husband, formerly a teacher at a local public school, retired in 2005 but has yet to receive the state pension he is owed. The Congolese government’s woeful track record suggests he likely never will. At 69 years old, Tinou has become the sole breadwinner for their seven children, not an uncommon scenario in Pointe-Noire; while some of her children are adults, they have struggled to find work in the depressed economy.

“These women are badasses,” says Dyhia Belhabib, principal investigator of fisheries with Ecotrust Canada, who has worked extensively on fisheries in West Africa and central Africa. She also says that the value they bring to the local economy often outweighs that of the industrial fishing sector, which takes the bulk of both the resource and the cash out of the country, rather than pumping it back into local communities. “The problem is that with industrial fisheries you can actually see the cash. You see the factories, the trucks, the ports.” With the women who work as an extension of the artisanal fishing sector, it’s less visible, Belhabib says: “They don’t necessarily go to the bank. They don’t necessarily keep official reports. It’s really a shadow market, but it’s still legal.”

As a result, observers say the concerns of women like Tinou, and those of Congo’s artisanal fisheries more generally, have often been sidelined by a hard up Congolese state that is heavily dependent on foreign investment, particularly from China. About 80 percent of the industrial fishing fleet operating off the Congolese coast is Chinese, as is a large fish-meal processing plant just outside of Pointe-Noire, and Chinese companies also have a hand in countless other industrial and infrastructural developments all over Congo. There is, therefore, little incentive for the Congolese state to rein in the Chinese trawlers, which pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for fishing permits in addition to other taxes, fees, and direct investments. A 2012 report funded by the European Union showed that between 2002 and 2006, two Chinese companies alone invested more than US $18-million to operate 17 industrial vessels in Congolese waters. That’s a substantial amount of money in a country where the mean annual income for an artisanal fisher is $4,382, and some earn as little as $276 a year.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that artisanal fishermen, rather than the industrial sector, would likely have borne the brunt of a hastily proposed blanket ban on shark fishing that was put forward by the Congolese government in 2001 but abandoned 14 months later after belated consultations with the fishers. While more permanently reinstating any such ban would make it easy to punish poor artisanal fishermen returning to land with sharks in tow, industrial trawlers could continue to operate with relative impunity farther out to sea beyond the reaches of the country’s woefully inadequate coast guard. This would be a cruel twist considering that these same trawlers have in various ways helped fuel the increasingly widespread phenomenon of artisanal shark fishing in the first place. According to Metcalfe from the University of Exeter, a blanket ban would ultimately do little to help restore local shark populations so long as artisanal fishers remain dependent on the catch for their survival. “You’re just going to drive the trade underground, where it will become more difficult to monitor,” he says.

Constant Momballa, a central Africa research officer for TRAFFIC, says that dramatically expanding data collection, collation, and analysis on local shark populations would be a better place to start. In part because of data shortcomings, the Congolese government currently defaults to using an on-demand quota system for artisanal fishers that does not consider maximum sustainable yields: whenever the fishers reach their fill, they can simply request more and pay for a new permit. There is a similar system in place for industrial fishing. Benoit Claude Atsango, Congo’s director general of fisheries and aquaculture, concedes that there are flaws in the current system, including the information gaps on sharks. “It’s always a problem of finances that holds us back,” he says, “meaning we haven’t been able to conclude any studies.”

Given sharks’ low fecundity, slow growth, and late sexual maturity, populations can struggle to recover from overexploitation, so action needs to be “immediate,” says Belhabib. Since the early 2000s, FAO has urged Congo to develop a national plan of action to better manage shark populations. While the organization has laid out guidelines and would provide guidance to Congo if solicited, change ultimately has to be a country-led process. Belhabib adds that any such development should take an inclusive approach: “Artisanal fishermen have fished for centuries. They know their waters. Their traditional knowledge is priceless and it’s not used enough.”

At around 1:00 a.m., Pangou and his crew begin the hours-long process of reeling in their nets, which have been out since about 9 p.m. The distant lights of industrial trawlers occasionally punctuate the darkness around us. Farther away along the horizon, sections of the night sky are lit up by orange flares emanating from hulking offshore oil rigs; in recent years, Congo has reduced the artisanal fishing zone by almost two-thirds to accommodate their growing number. There’s something dystopian about the whole scene. “It’s complete anarchy out here,” says Pangou, right on cue. “And the Congolese state is doing nothing to stop it. We need their support if we are going to survive.”

Gabi, the pilot, momentarily tries to keep up morale with an impromptu and effusive rendition of Moldovan pop group O-Zone’s dreadful one-hit wonder “Dragostea Din Tei,” better known as “The Numa Numa Song.” But as the meager state of the fishermen’s haul gradually becomes apparent, the boat descends into a despondent silence. Two large crabs, a handsome langoustine, four juvenile hammerheads, an even younger dusky shark, and two threatened guitarfish are tossed unceremoniously into the hold, where they slosh around in an oily mixture of sea water and engine fuel. That’s all there is. The sharks are already dead, but the two guitarfish cling to life for a while, occasionally thrashing helplessly beneath my feet. I find myself feeling almost as sorry for them as I do for the fishermen. There are no winners here tonight.

The crew hoists anchor, and as a steady rain sets in, Gabi turns us around to head back to shore shortly before dawn. Once back on land, Pangou will take two buses to get home, sleep for a few hours, and then maybe catch up on some Nigerian soap operas. But by the mid-afternoon, he’ll be back trawling the beach on foot, gathering updated weather and catch reports from returning pirogues. If conditions seem favorable and there are a boat available and a crew keen to join him, he’ll be ready to depart again at a moment’s notice. “I see the sea as my home,” he says. “When you are at sea, there is always hope.”

KISANFU, Democratic Republic of Congo — Just up a red dirt road, across an expanse of tall, dew-soaked weeds, bulldozers are hollowing out a yawning new canyon that is central to the world’s urgent race against global warming.

For more than a decade, the vast expanse of untouched land was controlled by an American company. Now a Chinese mining conglomerate has bought it, and is racing to retrieve its buried treasure: millions of tons of cobalt.

At 73, Kyahile Mangi has lived here long enough to predict the path ahead. Once the blasting starts, the walls of mud-brick homes will crack. Chemicals will seep into the river where women do laundry and dishes while worrying about hippo attacks. Soon a manager from the mine will announce that everyone needs to be relocated.

“We know our ground is rich,” said Mr. Mangi, a village chief who also knows residents will share little of the mine’s wealth.

This wooded stretch of southeast Democratic Republic of Congo, called Kisanfu, holds one of the largest and purest untapped reserves of cobalt in the world.

The gray metal, typically extracted from copper deposits, has historically been of secondary interest to miners. But demand is set to explode worldwide because it is used in electric-car batteries, helping them run longer without a charge.

Outsiders discovering — and exploiting — the natural resources of this impoverished Central African country are following a tired colonial-era pattern. The United States turned to Congo for uranium to help [[https://fnl.mit.edu/january-february-2021/the-legacy-of-the-involvement-of-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-in-the-bombs-dropped-on-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/#:~:text=Ultimately%2C%20the%20Congolese%20mine%20furnished,on%20Nagasaki%20three%20days%20later. build the bombs dropped]] on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then spent decades, and billions of dollars, seeking to protect its mining interests here.

Now, with more than [[https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-cobalt.pdf two-thirds]] of the world’s cobalt production coming from Congo, the country is once again taking center stage as major automakers commit to battling climate change by transitioning from gasoline-burning vehicles to battery-powered ones. The new automobiles rely on a host of minerals and metals often not abundant in the United States or the oil-rich Middle East, which sustained the last energy era.

But the quest for Congo’s cobalt has demonstrated how the clean energy revolution, meant to save the planet from perilously warming temperatures in an age of enlightened self-interest, is caught in a familiar cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship that often puts narrow national aspirations above all else, an investigation by The New York Times found.

The Times dispatched reporters across three continents drawn into the competition for cobalt, a relatively obscure raw material that along with lithium, nickel and graphite has gained exceptional value in a world trying to set fossil fuels aside.

More than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents show that the race for cobalt has set off a power struggle in Congo, a storehouse of these increasingly prized resources, and lured foreigners intent on dominating the next epoch in global energy.

In particular, a rivalry between China and the United States could have far-reaching implications for the shared goal of safeguarding the earth. At least here in Congo, China is so far winning that contest, with both the Obama and Trump administrations having stood idly by as a company backed by the Chinese government bought two of the country’s largest cobalt deposits over the past five years.

As the significance of those purchases becomes clearer, China and the United States have entered a new “Great Game” of sorts. This past week, during a visit promoting electric vehicles at a General Motors factory in Detroit, President Biden acknowledged the United States had lost some ground. “We risked losing our edge as a nation, and China and the rest of the world are catching up,” he said. “Well, we’re about to turn that around in a big, big way.”

China Molybdenum, the new owner of the Kisanfu site since late last year, bought it from Freeport-McMoRan, an American mining giant with a checkered history that five years ago was one of the largest producers of cobalt in Congo — and now has left the country entirely.

In June, just six months after the sale, the Biden administration warned that China might use its growing dominance of cobalt to disrupt the American push toward electric vehicles by squeezing out U.S. manufacturers. In response, the United States is pressing for access to cobalt supplies from allies, including Australia and Canada, according to a national security official with knowledge of the matter.

American automakers like Ford, General Motors and Tesla buy cobalt battery components from suppliers that depend in part on Chinese-owned mines in Congo. A Tesla longer-range vehicle requires about 10 pounds of cobalt, more than 400 times the amount in a cellphone.

Already, tensions over minerals and metals are rattling the electric vehicle market.

Deadly rioting in July near a port in South Africa, where much of Congo’s cobalt is exported to China and elsewhere, caused a global jump in the metal’s prices, a surge that only worsened through the rest of the year.

Last month, the mining industry’s leading forecaster said the rising cost of raw materials was likely to drive up battery costs for the first time in years, threatening to disrupt automakers’ plans to attract customers with competitively priced electric cars.

Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, said the mineral supply crunch needed to be confronted.

“We have to solve these things,” he said at an event in September, “and we don’t have much time.”

Automakers like Ford are spending billions of dollars to build their own battery plants in the United States, and are rushing to curb the need for newly mined cobalt by developing lithium iron phosphate substitutes or turning to recycling. As a result, a Ford spokeswoman said, “we do not see cobalt as a constraining issue.”

Increased mining and refining of cobalt by Chinese companies has helped meet the growing demand and advanced the fight against climate change. But as more electric vehicles are produced by more automakers worldwide, the International Energy Agency expects a cobalt shortage by 2030, based on an analysis of existing mines and those under construction. Other forecasters say a shortage could hit as soon as 2025.

A review by The Times of documents filed with regulatory authorities in China shows the acquisitions in Congo have followed a disciplined playbook, announced with great fanfare by Beijing in 2015, to dominate the world’s emerging clean energy economy.

As of last year, 15 of the 19 cobalt-producing mines in Congo were owned or financed by Chinese companies, according to a data analysis by The Times and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The biggest alternative to Chinese operators is Glencore, a Switzerland-based company that runs two of the largest cobalt mines there.

These Chinese companies have received at least $12 billion in loans and other financing from state-backed institutions, and are likely to have drawn billions more. In fact, the five biggest Chinese mining companies in Congo had lines of credit from state-backed banks that totaled $124 billion, according to the documents reviewed by The Times, even though one of them, China Molybdenum, described itself as “a pure business entity” traded on two stock exchanges.

China’s goal is to control the global supply chain from the metals in the ground to the batteries themselves, no matter where the vehicles are made. The approach, in part, echoes Henry Ford’s investments in Amazonian rubber plantations as the auto industry turned to mass production in the early 20th century.

The forested mine site at Kisanfu was just one of two major purchases in recent years by China Molybdenum. The first came in 2016, when it took control of Tenke Fungurume, a mine that on its own produces twice as much cobalt as any other country in the world. At least $1.59 billion of the $2.65 billion Tenke Fungurume price tag, financial records show, came from loans provided by Chinese state-owned banks.

As the Chinese were stepping up their focus on green energy in 2016, the soon-to-be U.S. president, Donald J. Trump, was extolling the fossil fuel industry, campaigning in West Virginia with a hard hat and shovel and falsely promising coal miners that “you’re going to be working your asses off!” After taking office, Mr. Trump would roll back requirements on American automakers intended to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, giving the Chinese an even wider lane.

“It is pretty heartbreaking what happened here,” said Nicole Widdersheim, who worked on Africa issues for the National Security Council during the Trump administration. “Just so stupid.”

The frenzy for Congo’s cobalt has attracted an international cast of opportunists, luminaries and shadowy characters eager to benefit. At one point, it also drew in a Chinese-based private equity firm that Hunter Biden helped found and that was later scrutinized in the 2020 presidential campaign.

At the same time, Chinese companies are running into new headwinds from Congo’s government, according to documents obtained by The Times and interviews with current and former senior U.S. officials.

Congolese officials are carrying out a broad review of past mining contracts, work they are doing with financial help from the American government as part of its broader anti-corruption effort. They are examining whether companies are fulfilling their contractual obligations, including a 2008 commitment from China to deliver billions of dollars’ worth of new roads, bridges, power plants and other infrastructure.

Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, in August named a commission to investigate allegations that China Molybdenum, the company that bought the two Freeport-McMoRan properties, might have cheated the Congolese government out of billions of dollars in royalty payments. The company risks being expelled from Congo.

At the Tenke Fungurume mine, there have long been problems associated with trespassers from nearby villages scavenging for cobalt. After China Molybdenum called on the government to help, Congolese troops fired on a trespasser inside the mine’s gates, killing him, as well as a second person who was shot after riots broke out in protest, witnesses and local officials told The Times.

Separately, at least a dozen employees or contractors at the mine told The Times that Chinese ownership had led to a drastic decline in safety and an increase in injuries, many of which were not reported to management. Two Congolese safety officers said workers were assaulted after they raised concerns and were offered bribes to cover up accidents.

“Things are falling apart in terms of safety,” said Alfred Kiloko Makeba, who retired last year after a decade working as a safety supervisor at the mine.

Vincent Zhou, a spokesman for China Molybdenum, rejected claims that the company had cheated the Congolese government or relaxed safety standards, saying the opposite was true, and questioned if there was an organized effort to undermine the company.

China has an idiom that goes something like: “Where there is a will to condemn, evidence will follow,” Mr. Zhou said in a written response to The Times. “Vaguely I feel that we may be caught in the gaming of greater powers.”

A Presidential Connection

African countries for years have been turning to China for help building infrastructure with loans or trades involving their natural resources — deals that analysts warn provide far more benefit to the Chinese.

A blueprint for those deals, now common across the continent, was sketched out in 2005 when Joseph Kabila walked into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Mr. Kabila, then just 33, was the new president of Congo after the assassination of his father, another tragic milepost on the poverty-stricken country’s road of violence and political disruption.

China was familiar territory for Mr. Kabila, who had received military training there in the late 1990s. This visit was about enlisting the help of President Hu Jintao in turning around Congo’s economy.

The United States, which had long provided economic and military assistance to Congo, was locked in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and had become increasingly uninterested in the country. Congo’s poor record on graft and human rights was also scaring away many international banks and Western investors.

Mr. Kabila’s wish list was long: He wanted new roads, schools and hospitals as part of a revival plan that, he hoped, would endear him back home to a nation exhausted and dispirited by years of conflict and corruption.

In exchange, he was prepared to offer up his country’s vast mineral wealth — unparalleled in much of the world.

In the imposing hall on Tiananmen Square, the two presidents outlined a deal that would change Central Africa’s balance of power, according to André Kapanga, a former adviser to Mr. Kabila who offered details of the meeting for the first time in an interview with The Times.

Mr. Hu explained that many people in China’s western provinces lived in deep poverty. Developing the area was a cornerstone of his domestic policy, and he needed minerals and metals to build out new industries. Congo was ready to help, Mr. Kabila assured him.

China had already acquired raw materials from Congo’s neighbor, Angola, where it offered generous financial support in exchange for oil.

But this potential deal with Mr. Kabila was more ambitious than any other, and a diplomatic drama would play out at the riverside Palais de la Nation in the capital of Kinshasa before it was sealed.

The setting was Mr. Kabila’s inauguration in 2006, after he stood before voters in a formal election and won the presidency. The Bush administration sent a delegation led by Elaine Chao, then the secretary of labor.

Mr. Kabila liked motorcycles, and she presented him with a Harley-Davidson trinket when she greeted him at a lunch. That would be the extent of their interaction, Ms. Chao believed, but members of her delegation urged her to ask for a private meeting, according to Laura Genero, an associate deputy labor secretary who was on the trip. To her surprise, Mr. Kabila complied with a meeting the next day.

Ms. Chao was so unprepared for the invitation that she had to borrow a beige pantsuit from Ms. Genero. She had packed just one work outfit.

The U.S. delegation congratulated Mr. Kabila on his democratic victory and listened as he talked about wanting to expand access to electricity across the nation. One of his aides characterized the meeting as mostly small talk.

But a similar meeting between the new president and Chinese officials played out differently, according to Mr. Kapanga, who was briefed on both the U.S. and Chinese discussions.

The Chinese used the opportunity to begin formal talks with Mr. Kabila that would result in a $6 billion agreement: China would pay for roads, hospitals, rail lines, schools and projects to expand electricity, all in exchange for access to 10 million tons of copper and more than 600,000 tons of cobalt.

The local media called it the “the deal of the century,” and while Mr. Kabila celebrated the agreement, the global financial community reacted more warily, worried Congo was taking on too much debt.

American officials marveled at the deal’s historic scale. In secret cables made public by Wiki Leaks, they noted that previous Chinese investment in Congo had been “an informal, somewhat disorganized collection of Chinese businesses” that did not seriously threaten U.S. interests.

Now something much grander was in the making: “2,000 miles of roadway linking Orientale and Katanga provinces, 31 hospitals, 145 health centers, two large universities and 5,000 government housing units are pledged,” according to a cable in 2008 from the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa to members of the Central Intelligence Agency, the secretary of state and other officials.

“And that’s not all,” the cable continued.

Attracting a Phoenix

By 2015, China’s presence in Congo had become visible in numerous infrastructure projects: Soccer stadiums rose from the dust, roadways were expanded, work began on water treatment facilities.

But not all of its progress in cornering the cobalt market could be measured in brick and mortar. The Chinese ambassador at the time, Wang Tongqing, kicked off an American-style diplomatic blitz.

Mr. Wang threw out the jump ball that year at a Chinese corporate basketball tournament that drew Congolese spectators.

He gave out scholarships to Congolese students to study in China and was on hand when a Chinese organization donated plane tickets for a Congolese choir to tour his country. At one point, he offered $1 million for Ebola relief in Congo.

Mr. Wang’s activities coincided with the 2015 rollout of his country’s “Made in China 2025” policy, which detailed China’s plan to transform itself into a “manufacturing superpower” in 10 areas, including batteries for electric vehicles.

Almost instantly a tidal wave of government-backed capital poured into Chinese companies in Congo and elsewhere. Deals quickly followed.

That year, the state-owned China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group said it would partner with Congo’s state mining company, Gécamines, to develop the Deziwa site, then one of the largest copper and cobalt concessions in the country.

In 2017, Zijin Mining, a Chinese state-backed company with a slogan of “Harmony Begets Wealth,” raised almost $700 million from a sale of private shares to develop its Kolwezi mine.

Public statements about the deals signaled some of China’s ambition, but the history and scale of the effort have not been previously reported.

Corporate filings, including annual reports and bond prospectuses, examined by The Times show that the five biggest Chinese companies in Congo had been given at least $124 billion in credit lines for their global operations. All of the companies are state-owned or have significant minority stakes held by various levels of the Chinese government.

“Unlike the U.S., the Chinese government is always behind Chinese investors in Africa and more specifically in D.R.C.,” said Mr. Kapanga, the former adviser to Mr. Kabila.

The biggest deal came in April 2016, when China Molybdenum, a company whose biggest shareholders are a government-owned company and a reclusive billionaire, made its $2.65 billion offer to buy Tenke Fungurume, an American-owned mine atop one of the biggest cobalt reserves in the world.

There was one complication. Freeport-McMoRan had a Canadian partner that had the right of first offer to buy its stake. China Molybdenum’s solution was to have a Shanghai-based private equity firm buy out the partner, but even that deal relied on money from the Chinese government.

None of the $1.14 billion raised to buy the partner’s share came from private investors, company filings show. Instead, it came from Chinese state-controlled entities, including from bank loans guaranteed by China Molybdenum as well as cash brought to the deal through obscure shell companies controlled by government-owned banks, according to the filings.

The board of the private equity firm, commonly known as BHR, was dominated by Chinese members but also included three Americans: Devon Archer, a businessman who later was convicted of defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe in a case still working through the legal system, and James Bulger, son of the former president of the Massachusetts State Senate.

Another was Hunter Biden, whose father was vice president at the time.

It is not clear if Mr. Biden, who had helped found the firm in 2013, was involved in the deal. Mr. Biden did not respond to requests for comment. A former member of the BHR board, who was not authorized to speak about internal business matters, said that none of the Americans had played a role and that the fees generated for the work had not been distributed to Mr. Biden or others. A spokesman for President Biden on Friday said he had not been made aware of his son’s connection to the sale.

How and why the firm had become involved was a mystery to the chief executive who negotiated the sale for Freeport-McMoRan’s Canadian-based partner, Lundin Mining.

“Were they a partner, their adviser or a financier? I don’t know,” said Paul Conibear, then Lundin’s chief executive.

An elaborate event under white tents in Kinshasa celebrated China’s new ownership in May 2017. Mr. Wang was there along with Chinese officials who had helped finance the purchase — and a host of Chinese government-affiliated bankers looking to make even more mining deals.

Within a few years, they would help orchestrate China Molybdenum’s purchase of Kisanfu, the huge untapped cobalt reserve, from the same American mining giant. Together the sales marked a changing of the guard in Congo as the United States abandoned its mining interests — a problem that now weighs on President Biden as he and his aides have come to realize the extent of China’s dominance in clean energy.

“The D.R.C. has a vast territory, rich natural resources and great investment potential,” Mr. Wang told the crowd. “A Chinese proverb says, ‘Build a beautiful nest to attract the phoenix.’”

‘Safety Is Just on Paper’

At first, the changes seemed almost trivial at Tenke Fungurume — a 24-hour operation that employs more than 7,000 across a landscape the size of Los Angeles marked by deep craters and dust kicked up by earth-moving vehicles.

The new Chinese managers showed up in shorts and sneakers, a shock to employees who had been required to wear steel-toed boots and safety goggles.

“We were like, ‘Oh, this is not possible,’” said Pierrot Kitobo Sambisaya, who worked as a metallurgist at the mine for a decade until 2019 and had grown accustomed to a stricter environment.

Soon, work anniversaries came and went with no recognition. Holiday parties where workers’ families were invited to tour the mine no longer took place. Dozens of janitor and driver jobs once held by Congolese citizens went to the Chinese.

That was just the start. Employees were concerned that the mine was also becoming more dangerous, according to interviews with workers in communities surrounding the mine, current and former safety inspectors, Congolese government officials and mining executives.

Workers climbed into acid tanks to conduct repairs without checking the air quality. Others drove bulldozers and other heavy equipment without training or did dangerous welding jobs without proper oversight.

Last year, a worker was sitting in his truck while it was being towed, and it flipped. The worker tried to jump to safety, but the truck landed on him and crushed him to death, according to an annual operations report from China Molybdenum.

All of it was an extreme departure from the company’s American predecessor, which had “zero tolerance” for risky activities and safety violations, according to Alfred Kiloko Makeba, the veteran safety supervisor, and 10 other current and former employees, managers and contractors.

Freeport-McMoRan, which had built the mine, had learned some hard lessons years before at its copper and gold mine in Indonesia, facing international protest over its dumping toxic mine waste into a river in the rainforest as well as violent conflicts over its operations there.

In Congo, the company had its own struggles as it moved to build Tenke Fungurume, displacing more than 1,500 residents in a haphazard process. But once the mine opened, it gained an unusual amount of respect for its commitment to worker safety, both among local officials and U.S. diplomats.

Worker safety is an issue at other industrial mines in Congo, but under Freeport, employees who violated rules were immediately disciplined or fired, safety officers said. Records examined by The Times show just one reported death among workers during the eight years Freeport-McMoRan ran the mine, although it repeatedly published accounts of near-fatal accidents as cautionary guides.

When safety inspectors discovered violations after China Molybdenum took over, they were sometimes told to overlook them, or offered bribes to do so, workers and supervisors said. And when they did try to enforce the rules, violence sometimes followed.

One safety officer said he was thrown to the ground by a worker he had called out for improperly using welding equipment. The man twisted his arm and broke his cellphone and work-issue camera.

An executive at Gécamines, the Congolese agency that is a minority shareholder in the mine, said employees had reported confrontations and safety problems to the agency’s board. Safety issues are now part of a broader review of China Molybdenum’s operations.

Mr. Zhou, the China Molybdenum spokesman, denied that any inspectors had been assaulted. The allegations, he suggested, were probably being fabricated by fired employees.

In a statement to The Times, he said the mine had “a robust occupational health and safety framework in place and continues to exercise its zero tolerance rules.” In fact, he said, “internal statistics” published in a company report this year showed that worker injuries had declined since the company took over.

But employees who said they had been repeatedly told not to report injuries believed the data was being fixed as part of a campaign to cover up rising hazards.

That suggestion, which The Times was not able to independently confirm and which China Molybdenum disputed, was crystallized for Mr. Makeba one evening last year when he received an urgent phone call. A worker at the mine had fallen from a high perch after not wearing the required safety harness, he said.

Mr. Makeba rushed to the site and was shocked to learn, he said, that the worker, who had broken his leg, had been taken to a private clinic instead of the mine’s.

Mr. Makeba said the employee told him that his supervisors had paid him to keep quiet so that it would not be reported to management, where it would show up on the company’s audited injury tally.

When Mr. Makeba alerted his own boss, he said, he was told to drop the matter.

Mr. Zhou rejected Mr. Makeba’s account, adding that “any form of cover-up in disclosures is against rules, and corporate values.”

But according to Mr. Makeba and another safety manager still working at the mine, labor conditions have become increasingly important to automakers sensitive to consumer and shareholder demands. So China Molybdenum, they said, has blocked them from reporting near fatalities and routinely ignored other injuries.

“Safety is just on paper now,” Mr. Makeba said.

Problems at Tenke Fungurume are not just limited to employees’ complaints inside the mine.

Freeport-McMoRan had struggled with trespassers who carted off bags of cobalt. Some even died when hand-dug tunnels flooded or collapsed.

With China Molybdenum in charge, the conflict became much worse.

The company, faced with thousands of newly arriving trespassers, asked the government to send soldiers to help control the situation, one executive who worked at the mine back then told The Times.

The military arrived and began patrolling Tenke Fungurume and other local mines, bulldozing depots where trespassers were selling their cobalt rocks to traders.

The troops remained for months, and the situation eventually turned deadly. A soldier at Tenke Fungurume opened fire, killing an unauthorized digger, according to an employee who told The Times he had witnessed the encounter.

Riots then erupted in the man’s home village when friends arrived carrying his body. In the melee, a protester was shot dead, according to three local officials and the mine employee.

China Molybdenum paid for the burials, they said.

Troops with AK-47s were posted outside the mine this year, along with security guards hired from a company founded by Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL turned private security consultant.

Even as this crackdown on theft was underway, the new managers at the mine were looking for ways to cut costs while increasing production.

China Molybdenum said it had saved more than $130 million a year through its “cost and efficiency” programs. “New management revitalizes the business by bringing ‘Chinese efficiency and Chinese elements,’” the company boasts on its website.

The Rush to Expand

China Molybdenum is steadily growing its output. Last December, it snatched up Kisanfu, paying Freeport-McMoRan $550 million for what is considered one of the world’s largest untapped supplies of cobalt. The ground underneath the site contains enough cobalt, according to China Molybdenum’s estimates, to power hundreds of millions of long-range Teslas.

And then in August, China Molybdenum announced plans to spend $2.5 billion at Tenke Fungurume to double production over the next two years. When the expansion is complete, the mine will produce nearly 40,000 tons a year. Last year, the United States produced just 600 tons.

This rush to expand, however, has drawn scrutiny from top government officials in Congo, reaching all the way to Mr. Tshisekedi, the president.

Questions have surfaced over payments Tenke Fungurume’s operators may owe to Congo, dating back to when the American company controlled the mine. When new deposits are confirmed at Tenke Fungurume, the owners are required to notify Gécamines, the Congolese agency, and pay $12 for every additional ton.

The accusations have provoked a bitter dispute between Congolese officials and the mine managers, with China Molybdenum’s spokesman calling the allegations “unbelievable, wrong calculations” based on an accounting error.

Gécamines executives have discussed forcing out the management at Tenke Fungurume or even taking the mine out of China Molybdenum’s control, according to two Congolese mining executives involved in confidential discussions as well as a government official briefed on the talks.

Robert North, a New Mexico-based geologist who has helped prepare reserve estimates at the mine for Freeport and China Molybdenum, said both companies as well as Gécamines knew of large amounts of cobalt underground at the site. China Molybdenum has been cautious in declaring it, he said, until the company knows it wants to go to the expense of extracting the deeper layers.

Mr. Tshisekedi’s commission is still investigating the allegations, and the president himself recently presided over a tense, six-hour meeting with top company executives.

Separately, the Congolese government, with financial assistance from the United States, is examining numerous mining contracts to determine whether Congo has been shortchanged more broadly. While the Chinese-funded infrastructure projects got off to a flashy start, many have not been built, officials said.

During a visit to the cobalt-mining region this year, the president acknowledged that corrupt or incompetent government officials in Congo might deserve some blame for deals that have left the nation feeling shortchanged.

“Some of our compatriots had badly negotiated the mining contracts,” he said. “I’m very harsh on these investors who come to enrich themselves alone. They come with empty pockets and leave as billionaires.”

Chinese government officials insist that the relationship is still on track and that the benefits to Congo are substantial.

The countries have a “longstanding friendship, and the bilateral practical cooperation has yielded fruitful win-win results and enjoys broad prospects,” Zhao Lijian, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a news conference in September.

In an interview in Kinshasa, Mr. Tshisekedi said that his focus was not on which foreign power would dominate mining in Congo, but rather on how his country could share in the wealth generated by the clean energy revolution.

“We have an amazing potential for renewable energy, be it through our strategic metals or through our rivers,” he said, referring to both mining and hydroelectric power. “Our idea is, how can we put this amazing resource at the disposal of the world, but while making sure that it first benefits Congolese and it benefits Africans?”

Our investigation, based on the largest data leak ever in Africa, “Congo Hold-Up,” points to illicit activities on the part of some Lebanese. It reveals how the Congolese branch of BGFIbank helped a Lebanese business empire accused by the United States of funding Lebanon’s Hezbollah to circumvent US sanctions.

“Congo Hold-Up” is the result of six months of work on analyzing this data. It reveals how more than $138 million of public funds belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo were embezzled in the country between 2013 and 2018, primarily by the entourage of DRC former President Joseph Kabila, with the help of the private commercial bank BGFI.

This collusion can be explained by the links between the bank’s Congolese subsidiary and Kabila’s clan: BGFI DRC, whose parent company is based in Gabon, was managed by Selemani Francis Mtawle, the former president’s adoptive brother, from 2011 to 2018. When the subsidiary was founded in 2010, Kabila’s sister, Gloria Mteyu, held 40 percent of the company’s shares.

The Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and Mediapart, an independent French online investigative journal, obtained more than 3.5 million confidential documents issued by the BGFIBank Group, including bank statements, emails, contracts, invoices and business records, as well as millions of detailed banking transactions that took place over the span of more than 10 years.

These documents were shared with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), and its media partners including L’Orient-Le Jour. They expose the ingenious mechanisms put in place by the bank, which contributed to the illicit enrichment of the president and his clan, allowing them to tap into the state coffers.

In addition to the embezzled $138 million, the equivalent of 250,000 years of an average salary in the DRC, the investigation shows that $33 million was deposited in cash, and $72 million from unknown sources channeled through the BGFI account at the Central Bank of Congo.

This means that a total of $243 million of ill-gotten public funds were allegedly acquired by Kabila’s close entourage through accounts at the BGFI.

The consortium of investigative journalists sought comments from Mtawle, Mteyu, Kabila, BGFIBank and its Congolese subsidiary on multiple occasions, but all refused to comment.

This is not the first financial scandal for the BGFIBank group, which is the largest banking group in Central Africa, with 3.5 billion euros in deposits and 2,200 employees in 11 countries.

The best known is the "ill-gotten gains" case opened by the Financial Pole of the Court of Paris in 2010, in which the family of former Gabonese president Omar Bongo was accused of having used the bank and BNP Paribas to acquire at least 35 million euros worth of property in France between 1996 and 2008.

In October 2016, a case involving the bank’s DRC subsidiary was the object of a report by the Belgian daily Le Soir: the “Lumumba Papers,” a data leak based on documents disclosed by Jean-Jacques Lumumba, the former head of the credit department at the Congolese BGFI Bank.

These documents shed light on suspicious activities within the Congolese subsidiary: dubious withdrawals, unjustified checks, suspicious payments from the Central Bank of Congo to Egal — a private company owned by a close relative of Kabila — and other questionable transactions between BGFI and the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) in DRC.

These findings were then studied in depth by two NGOs — now partners of the “Congo Hold-UP” — the PPLAAF and The Sentry, and then by Jeune Afrique in 2017 and 2018.

The leaked documents triggered a series of internal audits, to which “Congo Hold-Up” had access — their findings had serious implications for the bank, but were not sufficiently thorough.

This first leak did not, however, make it possible to put an end to the bank’s embezzlement activities, despite the removal from his post and discreet transfer in May 2018 of Mtawle to the bank’s headquarters in Gabon.

Despite US sanctions

In the coming weeks, the partners of Congo Hold-Up, which consist of nearly 100 contributors working for 19 media outlets and five NGOs in 18 countries, will lay out BGFIBank’s previously veiled malpractices. Contacted by the investigation’s partners, Jules Alingete, the head of the DRC’s Inspectorate General of Finance (IGF), put it clearly and bluntly: “For me, BGFIBank is a mafia bank. This is an inspector general talking here, after having conducted his investigations. What happened is unacceptable.”

Based on this unprecedented information leak in Africa, the consortium will disclose previously unseen business in the heart of the Congolese kleptocracy, ranging from massive misappropriation of public funds to corruption scandals, including millions of dollars that the Kabila clan received from Chinese companies involved in major Congolese mining projects.

The letterbox company Sud Oil, which is under Mtwale’s de facto control, as well as its offices, which enabled the misappropriation of more than $92 million in public funds, via the BGFI DRC, are the focus of the first episode in the Congo-Hold Up series, according to an investigation conducted by Mediapart.

For its part, L’Orient-Le Jour will publish next week a series of articles on the Lebanese aspect of the financial scandal, particularly how BGFIBank DRC helped to expand the commercial empire of a network of Lebanese individuals and companies that the US accuses of financing Hezbollah, and that had already been incriminated by The Sentry investigation.

The documents obtained point to how the Congolese bank helped this network of companies to prosper for years by enabling them to gain access to the international banking system, despite being under US sanctions.

These special ties also manifested themselves in two directions: one of these companies transferred several million dollars to the front company under Mtwale’s control.

The massive international transfers of some $100 million were made despite the many red flags. Another company in this Lebanese network has even received millions of euros in grants from an international development fund.

A military court in Democratic Republic of Congo Saturday sentenced 51 people to death, several in absentia, in a mass trial over the 2017 murder of two UN experts in a troubled central region.

Capital punishment is frequently pronounced in murder cases in DRC, but is routinely commuted to life imprisonment since the country declared a moratorium on executions in 2003.

Dozens of people have been on trial for more than four years over a killing that shook diplomats and the aid community, although key questions about the episode remain unanswered.

Michael Sharp, an American, and Zaida Catalan, a Swedish-Chilean, disappeared as they probed violence in the Kasai region after being hired to do so by the United Nations.

They were investigating mass graves linked to a bloody conflict that had flared between the government and a local group.

Their bodies were found in a village on March 28, 2017, 16 days after they went missing. Catalan had been beheaded.

Unrest in the Kasai region had broken out in 2016, triggered by the killing of a local traditional chief, the Kamuina Nsapu, by the security forces.

Around 3,400 people were killed, and tens of thousands of people fled their homes, before the conflict fizzled out in mid-2017.

Prosecutors at the military court in Kananga had demanded the death penalty against 51 of the 54 accused, 22 of whom are fugitives and are being tried in absentia.

The charge sheet ranged from "terrorism" and "murder" to "participation in an insurrectional movement" and "the act of a war crime through mutilation".

According to the official version of events, pro-Kamuina Nsapu militiamen executed the pair on March 12, 2017, the day they went missing.

But in June 2017, a report handed to the UN Security Council described the killings as a "premeditated setup" in which members of state security may have been involved.

During the trial, prosecutors suggested that the militiamen had carried out the murders to take revenge against the United Nations, which the sect accused of failing to prevent attacks against them by the army.

If so, those who purportedly ordered the act were not identified throughout the marathon proceedings.

Among the main accused was a colonel, Jean de Dieu Mambweni, who prosecutors say colluded with the militiamen, providing them with ammunition. He has denied the charges and his lawyers say the trial is a set-up.

Mambweni was among those originally facing the death penalty, but instead was only sentenced to 10 years in jail for "disobeying orders and failure to assist a person in danger". His defence team said he would appeal the verdict.

Two more detainees were acquitted, including a journalist.

Saturday's verdict is liable to appeal at the High Military Court in Kinshasa, DRC's capital.

ABUJA, Nigeria—Prince Ngoma was just about to depart a mining site in Central African Republic’s (CAR) eastern village of Aïgbado when heavily armed Russian mercenaries in a pickup truck drove in, opened fire, and burned down the houses in the area.

“They didn’t speak a word to anyone, only their guns did the talking,” said Ngoma, who was only there to meet a friend. “I saw people screaming and falling on the ground. It was only by luck that I survived.”

For about 20 minutes at around noon on Jan. 16, Ngoma said, the Russians opened fire repeatedly before fighters from the Union for Peace (UPC) rebel group, which the mercenaries have constantly targeted, showed up and began to fire back, wounding about four fighters and causing the Russians to retreat.

“We counted eight bodies after the Russians had left,” he told The Daily Beast. “These were civilians killed at the spot during the shooting.”

But the Russians weren’t satisfied. As hundreds of frightened villagers ran to the nearby Yanga community (located 40 miles from Aïgbado), the Russian mercenaries, this time accompanied by CAR government forces commonly referred to as FACA, chased them there and slaughtered as many people as they could.

“The killings went on for two days.” Abdoulaye Ishmael, a farmer in Yanga, told The Daily Beast. “Since the incident happened, we've counted up to 70 dead bodies.”

The United Nations, through its spokesman Stéphane Dujarric, said it has received reports of the incident involving CAR troops and “other security personnel” and is “currently confirming the number of casualties and displacement.” The human rights team in the country known as MINUSCA has been dispatched to the area—and they may be shocked by what they find.

Locals say there are corpses littered in the forest between Aïgbado and Yanga, while fishermen at the Kotto River that passes through Yanga have retrieved 14 dead bodies, including women and children, according to local reports.

“Everyday, we keep seeing new dead bodies,” said Ishmael. “The number of people killed by the Russians could be much more than what we’ve seen or heard so far.”

Reports of Russian aggression in CAR have become commonplace. Since the 2018 killings of three Russian journalists who were investigating the local activities of Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit linked to Russia President Vladimir Putin’s close associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, hostility towards locals in the impoverished Central African nation has been on the rise.

In December 2020, Wagner mercenaries fired on a truck for failing to stop at a checkpoint in the town of Bambari, injuring the driver and killing three passengers, according to a CNN report. Two months later, Russians opened fire at a mosque in Bambari, killing about 21 people, including children and the elderly, before burning down homes nearby. Last March, it was also reported that the Russians shot and killed a local chief, whom they had accused of having a soft spot for the rebels near the town of Bambari. A month after, Wagner mercenaries kidnapped four community leaders from Bria and, as The Daily Beast previously reported, flew them to an undisclosed location before storming Koui to seize the sultan of the northwestern town, along with his bodyguard and assistant. They announced much later that the three men had been killed in a landmine explosion not far from the sultan’s house.

The latest spate of atrocities which began in mid-January may still be unfolding. Sources told The Daily Beast that the Russians have blocked access to Aïgbado and Yanga and restricted movements in and out of the communities. The local media is reporting that the mercenaries have set up an outpost in Aïgbado and anyone who tries to leave the village is shot at. Residents say everyone is living in fear.

“Everyone in Aïgbado is scared of walking on the streets because anything can happen to you if you come face to face with the Russians and FACA,” said Ngoma. “There are a number of villagers missing since January 16, and we suspect they've been killed or abducted by Russian mercenaries and FACA.”

Since December 2017, when Russia secured an exemption to the UN arms embargo, allowing Moscow to deliver arms and training for CAR forces, Wagner mercenaries have appeared all over the restive African nation, often guarding lucrative gold and diamond mines. Wagner recruits many of its mercenaries from the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. Prigozhin—often called “Putin’s chef” because of the huge contracts handed out to his catering company—is the mastermind behind both Wagner and Russia’s involvement in CAR and Africa; it is unknown how closely he consults with his comrades in the Kremlin

Prigozhin’s private military has also been linked to recent coups in Mali and Burkina Faso, both of which also have major gold mines.

Regarded as one of the world’s poorest nations, the CAR descended into civil war in 2013. A mainly Muslim rebel coalition called Séléka took control of the capital Bangui, overthrew the government, and began plundering villages. They also targeted Christians and supporters of the former president. In response, Christian vigilantes began a bloody program of ethnic cleansing against the Muslim minority, causing the UN to impose an arms embargo and create a peacekeeping mission.

Muslim rebels and Christian militants still control much of the country and continue to fight each other to take control of territory and mineral resources. A helpless Faustin-Archange Touadéra, who was sworn in as president in 2016, turned to Russia for security assistance months after taking office and Moscow accepted but with an agreement to allow Russia to explore CAR’s natural resources, and Wagner mercenaries are doing so with brutality.

“What happened here in Aïgbado confirms what people have been saying, that going to a gold mine in this country is like a death sentence,” said Ngoma. “You just can’t survive in an environment where the Russians are so interested.”