DRCongo La Gecamines defends accusations of embezzlement – La Libre Afrique

According to the Congolese public mining company, it is a question of responding to "Global Witness, Carter Center and, more recently, Enough Project".

In this report, Gécamines denies "the allegedly non-transparent nature of its finances" and that "hundreds of millions of dollars" disappeared from its accounts between 2011 and 2014, as well as the fact that its assets were sold to an undervalued price.

"Near the dollar"

The public company reports that its accounts are audited annually "by international external auditors" and reported to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). "All amounts allegedly missing from Gécamines' accounts for fiscal years 2011-2014 are included in the dollar".

Gécamines adds that the amounts it has received for the sale of assets (ERG, CNMC and TFM operations) in 2016 "are included in the 2016 EITI report and the amounts collected during the 2017 financial year will certainly be published by the EITI in its next report ". It ensures that these assets "have been sold at their market value, as assessed by internationally recognized investment banks".

The report also states that Gécamines "has paid $ 372 million to the state" and not "75 million" as claimed by critics.

DRC: $ 750 Million in tax losses due to corruption

The fault of development partners

Gécamines attacks in turn, accusing "the good advice of" development partners "" to have culminated in the cutting of "a flagship of the African mining industry", and that "to the benefit of foreign mining groups." Using a bold shortcut, Gécamines says that "this is how more than 33 million tons of copper were transferred to foreign partners, leaving only 400,000 tons to Gécamines."

And to dispute that the public company does not take into account the "national interests" when it claims large sums to accept the sale of assets by its partners "even though these arm-wrestling have systematically allowed to assert the rights from the DRC and Gécamines, with finally very good results like the TFM or Glencore files, unanimously hailed ".

The Congolese state-owned company claims to be part of the policy of "developing countries that have made the legitimate choice to reclaim their natural resources and impose a better sharing of income between investors and host countries, which ask to increase their own resources to drive their development policy and reduce their dependence on conditional foreign aid.

The report is available at www.gecamines.cd/report.html

Where did the millions of Gecamines go?

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