LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

an outhouse belonging to a distant relative where Lavie, his wife, and their four children had lived since they fled rebel attacks on their home village two years previously.

      The signature falsetto guitar of Congolese music drifted over the jagged rooftops of the tiny metal shacks sprayed across the slopes. Lavie’s wife, whose wedding ring he had fashioned from a plastic bottle top, was out foraging for leaves. Anna fell asleep on the shack’s lone bed. Her younger brother, Espoir, tottered around, oblivious to his sister’s plight.

      A few weeks later I got in touch with the clinic’s medics to ask after Anna. When she had kept throwing up the peanut paste, the French charity had driven her to the hospital at Bunyakiri. By then there was little anyone could do. Her immune system destroyed by malnutrition, she died of an infection.

      The heavens opened the day they buried Augustin Katumba Mwanke. The Congolese establishment sheltered under marquees in Kinshasa before the coffin that sported an enormous floral garland.⁴⁷ In a black suit and black shirt Joseph Kabila arrived amid a phalanx of bodyguards manoeuvring to keep an umbrella over his head. It was a rare public appearance for a reclusive president said to have spent his early years in office in the company of video games. His face was expressionless. Barely two months had passed since he had rigged his way to victory in the presidential election, securing a second five-year term. Now the mastermind behind both his power and his wealth was gone. The previous day, 12 February 2012, the American pilot of the jet carrying a group of Kabila’s senior officials to Bukavu by Lake Kivu had misjudged the landing. Katumba’s last moments came as the aircraft veered off the runway and smashed into a grassy embankment. He was forty-eight.

      One other guest at the funeral stood out. He was the lone white face in the front row. Kabila clasped his hand. The burly, bearded man in a yarmulke, the Jewish skullcap, was Dan Gertler. He was the all-important intersection between the shadow state that controlled access to Congo’s minerals and the multinational mining companies that coveted them.

      The grandson of one of the founders of Israel’s diamond exchange, in his early twenties Gertler set forth to seek his own fortune. He went to Angola, then still deep in civil war and a rich source of diamonds. But another Israeli, Lev Leviev, had already staked a strong claim there. Gertler arrived in Congo in 1997, days after Laurent Kabila had overthrown Mobutu. An ultra-orthodox Jew, he was introduced by a rabbi to Joseph Kabila, newly installed as the head of the Congolese army.⁴⁸ The younger Kabila and Gertler had much in common. Each stood in the shadow of his elders, carrying a heavy burden on young shoulders into the cauldron of Congolese warfare and politics. They became firm friends.

      Gertler soon discovered the value of his friendship with the president’s son. Kabila Sr was in urgent need of funds to arm his forces against Rwandan and Ugandan invaders and to butter up his allies for the fight.⁴⁹ When Joseph took his new friend to meet his father, the president told the young Israeli that if he could raise $20 million without delay, he could have a monopoly to buy every diamond mined in Congo. Gertler cobbled together the cash and was granted the monopoly.

      Not for the last time, an arrangement that suited Gertler and the Kabila clan hardly served the interests of the Congolese people. ‘It wasn’t a good deal for us,’ Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, then the finance minister, told me. ‘We should have opened the market to the highest bidder.’⁵⁰ UN investigators declared that Gertler’s diamond monopoly had been a ‘nightmare’ for Congo’s government and a ‘disaster’ for the local diamond trade, encouraging smuggling and costing the treasury tax revenue.⁵¹ It could not last. After Joseph Kabila succeeded his assassinated father in 2001, the monopoly was cancelled under pressure from foreign donors.⁵²

      Gertler was not deterred. He re-established a commanding position in the Congolese diamond trade by arranging to buy stones from the state-owned diamond miner and began to turn his attention to the far bigger prize: the copper and cobalt of Katanga, where production and prices would rise dramatically as Asian demand for base metals soared. His most important asset – his bond with the new president – was intact. ‘Gertler showed that he could help the family and, in return, they said, “We can do business with you,”’ a diplomat who spent years watching Gertler’s exploits in Congo told me. ‘Kabila can only keep himself in power with the help of people like Gertler: it’s like an insurance mechanism – someone who can get you money and stuff when you need it.’

      Over the years that followed, Gertler cultivated Katumba too, even inviting him to a party on a yacht in the Red Sea that included a performance by Uri Geller, the Israeli illusionist and self-proclaimed psychic.⁵³ In a reverie of gratitude to Gertler, in the final pages of his posthumously published memoir Katumba wrote that ‘in spite of all our seeming differences, I am proud to be the brother you never had.’⁵⁴

      The trio of Kabila, Katumba and Gertler was unassailable. ‘It’s like an exclusive golf club,’ one of Kabila’s former ministers told me. ‘If you go and say, “The founders are cheating,” they’re going to say: “And who the hell are you?”’⁵⁵ Gertler’s role in this exclusive club was manifold. ‘It’s an amalgam – business, political assistance, finance,’ said Olivier Kamitatu, who became an opposition legislator after his five-year stint as Kabila’s planning minister.⁵⁶ Gertler’s particular contribution was to build a tangled corporate web through which companies linked to him have made sensational profits through sell-offs of some of Congo’s most valuable mining assets. ‘The line between the interests of the state and the personal interests of the president is not clear,’ Kamitatu told me. ‘That is the presence of Gertler.’

      Since he first rode to Laurent Kabila’s rescue with $20 million to fund the war effort, Gertler has proved himself invaluable to Congo’s rulers. Katumba wrote in his memoir that Gertler’s ‘inexhaustible generosity, and the extreme efficiency of his assistance, have been decisive for us in the most crucial moments.’⁵⁷ Deals in which he was involved are said to have helped finance Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election campaign.⁵⁸ Kamitatu told me that Gertler had helped Kabila win that election and said he had also come up with cash for the military campaign against Laurent Nkunda’s rebels in the East. I asked Gertler’s representatives whether he had assisted Kabila at these moments and during the 2011 elections. They did not respond. Gertler has, however, denied that he has underpaid for Congolese mining assets. ‘The lies are screaming to the heavens,’ he told a reporter from Bloomberg in 2012.⁵⁹

      Kamitatu, who is the son of one of Congo’s independence leaders and trained in business before a political career that began as a senior figure a rebel group during the war, sees the shadow state as the root of his nation’s failure to escape poverty. ‘You can’t develop the country through parallel institutions. Every infrastructure project you undertake is not done through a strategic vision but with a view to the personal financial results,’ he told me as we sat at his house in Kinshasa in 2013. Politics and private business have fused, Kamitatu believed. Winning a presidential election costs tens of millions of dollars, and the only people with that kind of money are the foreign mining houses. ‘I am extremely worried about a political system where the voters are starving and the politicians buy votes with money from natural resource companies,’ Kamitatu said. ‘Is that democracy?’

      Dan Gertler’s Congolese mining deals have made him a billionaire. Many of the transactions in which he has played a part are fiendishly complicated, involving multiple interlinked sales conducted through offshore vehicles registered in tax havens where all but the most basic company information is secret. Nonetheless, a pattern emerges. A copper or cobalt mine owned by the Congolese state or rights to a virgin deposit are sold, sometimes in complete secrecy, to a company controlled by or linked to Gertler’s offshore network for a price far below what it is worth. Then all or part of that asset is sold at a profit to a big foreign mining company, among them some of the biggest groups on the London Stock Exchange.

      Gertler did not invent complexity in mining deals. Webs of subsidiaries and offshore holding companies are common in the resource industries, either to dodge taxation or to shield the beneficiaries from scrutiny. But even by the industry’s bewildering standards, the structure of Gertler’s Congo deals is labyrinthine. The sale of SMKK was typical.⁶⁰

Скачать книгу