Four hundred men work in the underground mining fields of the massive, Congo iron ore deposit known as Tenke Fungurume, but over the past decade, one man has had a huge influence on the lives of its more than 5,000 employees.
Before he was ousted from the company that operates it, three executives close to a Colombian drug lord, Miguel Bosek, controlled most of the mining in Congo’s eastern region.
Bosek, one of the world’s richest drug kingpins, helped run the tax evasion scheme inside the minerals company, Congo Oseberg Limitada (COUL). The scheme involved paying the Colombian drug lord, through his corrupt mining partners, with profits held offshore.
COUL was supposed to be used to finance the mining of Tenke Fungurume in order to make the company more attractive to investors.
In reality, Congo’s Kinshasa government used the ruse to fool its international partners, including the IMF, banks and the World Bank.
At the heart of Congo’s corrupt minerals trade is the Boende Gold Tin Plant in Lorrain which was allegedly in charge of the scheme.
The plant has a documented history of questionable ownership.
Though decades have passed since it was first touted as a viable mining hub, it still produces gold and tin, a key ingredient in making illegal drugs.
After Bosek was arrested in Colombia, where he was tried and sentenced to 30 years in prison, COUL continued to use “impunity” as a key element in its business model, says Olivier Bonnet, author of The Congo: The Atelec Story, from 1979 to 1995.
According to a report by Bonnet and two other researchers for the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in 2011, “Congo Oseberg” could run out of funding to operate the Tenke mine if they did not open a new office in Geneva, Switzerland.
The report said the transfer of the embassy building from Congo President Joseph Kabila’s right-hand man, John Numbi, to COUL in 2015 “was used to enable the transfer of assets to a UN representative with a strong financial network in Switzerland.”
“It appears that Kabila’s supposed ministerial allies in the West took on the responsibilities of running mining companies,” Bonnet says.