COMMENT - Glencore indicted in US. - MrK
(LUSAKA TIMES) Glencore, Majority Owners of Mopani Mines, Subpoenaed by US Justice Department, Shares Tumble
July 3, 2018191,443 views
Glencore, the majority owners of Mopani Mines has been ordered to hand over documents and records to US regulators related to its operations in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela dating as far back as 2007, sending its shares tumbling 12 per cent.
The Swiss-based mining and trading group led by billionaire Ivan Glasenberg said on Tuesday that it had received a subpoena from the US Department of Justice to produce documents with respect to compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and US money laundering statutes. The records related to the company’s activities in Nigeria, Venezuela and the DRC.
“Glencore is reviewing the subpoena and will provide further information in due course as appropriate,” the company said.
Glencore is the world’s biggest commodities trader, shifting millions of tonnes of metals, minerals and oil across the globe.
The company prides itself on operating in jurisdictions where many of its rivals fear to tread such as the DRC, Africa’s biggest copper producer and home to significant deposits of cobalt.
Traders noted that the DoJ subpoena comes just weeks after Glencore settled a dispute with Dan Gertler, its former business partner in the DRC.
Glencore said it would pay Mr Gertler in Euros so as to not fall foul of US sanctions, which were placed on the Israeli billionaire last year for his “opaque and corrupt mining deals” in the DRC.
At the time Glencore said it did not believe it was necessary to apply for a licence from the US government to pay Mr Gertler because no US person or the US financial system would be involved in the transactions.
It also claimed it has discussed the royalty payments, which it stopped paying in December, with the appropriate authorities in US and Switzerland, where the company has its headquarters.
However, the move unnerved investors and analysts who said the deal would test Washington’s resolve over sanctioned individuals. On the same day Glencore announced its deal with Mr Gertler, the US Treasury department placed sanctions on 14 companies with ties to the Israeli businessman, including the vehicle that will receive the royalty payments from Glencore.
The DoJ subpoena is the latest in a string of problems to hit Glencore this year.
In addition to its legal fight with Mr Gertler, it also agreed to write off $5.6bn of debt in a joint venture with Gecamines, the DRC’s state mining, to end another legal dispute.
The company could also face a bribery probe by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office over its ties to Mr Gertler.
Global Witness, a campaign group, said: “Holding Glencore accountable is a huge step in global accountability more generally. It would set a precedent for companies all over the world who, in many cases, are able to act with impunity in regards to the world’s mineral wealth.”
In early trading on Tuesday, Glencore shares were down 12 per cent to 303p, wiping more than £5bn off its market capitalisation, which now stands at £45bn.
“There is not enough detail in the release to understand exactly what the investigation holds, however with the subpoena covering multiple countries, this would indicate that there is a relatively thorough investigation at hand,” said Tyler Broda, analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
“The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act appears at first investigation to provide subject to sanctions, fines and penalties up to $25m or twice the gain or loss caused by the violation and imprisonment for up to 5 years per occurrence,” added Mr Broda.
Labels: DAN GERTLER, DRC, GLENCORE INTERNATIONAL AG, IVAN GLASENBERG, MINING, TONY HAYWARD
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COMMENT - This is the same Dan Gertler whose Cayman Island based RP Capital Partners privatised ZAMTEL to the Libyans state. Read more
background about Dan Gertler and Glencore International PLC here. Tokyo Sexwale and the DRC's Mr Grab
17 Aug 2012 07:00 - James Wood, Craig McKune, Stefaans Brümmer
A $150-million investment ties Tokyo Sexwale to a controversial Israeli businessman as he pulled off the "heist" of a prize mining asset in the DRC. Tokyo Sexwale funded the controversial Dan Gertler, who 'grabbed and flipped' DRC mining assets. (Oupa Nkosi, M&G)
The name of Dan Gertler, the Israeli, has become synonymous with "grabbing and flipping" – he allegedly used his relationship with politicians to bag Democratic Republic pf Congo mineral concessions, stripped from others if necessary, only to sell them on at great profit.
He most controversially flipped the multibillion-rand Kolwezi tailings project, stripped from Canada's First Quantum Minerals, to a London-listed miner in 2010. Gertler, who strenuously denies wrongdoing, earned the wrath of anti-corruption campaigners and much negative publicity, but Sexwale and his associates' proximity to these events has gone unreported.
And while there is no evidence that Sexwale or his associates actively participated in the Kolwezi grab and flip, they arguably sailed very close to the wind after investing $150-million with Gertler two years earlier.
That investment involved them partnering Gertler as he sold Kalukundi, a separate concession "grabbed" by a third party, back to its original owner.
Kalukundi grab
The Kalukundi concession, located in the heart of the south-eastern DRC copper belt, was worth fighting over. A December 2006 expert report predicted high yields of copper and cobalt should a mine be developed, which would pay for itself in less than four years.
At the time Kalukundi was owned by Congolese company Swanmines, which was part-owned by Canadian miner Africo Resources. Africo listed in Toronto that month, seeking capital to develop the mine and start digging.
In April 2007, Africo was readying a large share offer, hoping to raise more than $130-million. It also bought more shares in Swanmines to become its majority shareholder and gain firm control of Kalukundi. Or so it thought.
Another company appeared, claiming to be the true owner of Africo's stake, having "bought" it for a measly $600 000 from a former Africo employee, who claimed he was entitled to sell it to enforce a labour-related debt judgment. Both the debt judgment and the sale in execution were allegedly done in secret, without Africo being informed.
This unleashed a slew of litigation. Africo brought judicial misconduct motions against three judges and sought to have the "sale" of its stake nullified.
But without legal certainty, Africo had to can the $130-million share offer, leaving it increasingly out of pocket as the dispute dragged on in DRC courts.
In a letter to shareholders, Africo summarised the "perplexing and frustrating" state of its litigation, voicing "a profound sense of grievance at what is clearly an attempted theft of [the] asset by third parties through the systematic misuse of the judicial system".
Enter Gertler … and Vipar
Africo was over a barrel when Gertler, a confidant of DRC President Joseph Kabila, entered with an offer it could hardly refuse: he would buy out the intruder company to make the legal problem go away, while buying a controlling stake in Africo itself, capitalising it at last.
The deal was concluded in July 2008, with Africo selling new shares worth about $100-million to a Gertler company, while paying for the return of the lost Swanmines stake with shares worth about $13.5-million. This gave the Gertler company, Camrose Resources, a 63% controlling stake in Africo.
Africo chair Chris Theodoropoulos said: "In hindsight, the $100-million financing by Camrose was of great benefit to Africo and its shareholders. Given the economic turbulence of the times, and Africo's legal difficulties in the DRC, we were unlikely to find other investors of this magnitude."
But Gertler was not alone. In announcing the deal, Africo had to disclose that "Vipar Investments Limited has made certain credit facilities available" to Gertler's Camrose and that "Vipar may become a direct or indirect holder of securities of Africo pursuant to the terms of the facility ."
Put differently, Camrose had paid for the Africo acquisition – and presumably whatever millions to pay off the intruder – with a loan from Vipar, which under the terms of the loan had certain rights over Camrose and its assets.
Who was Vipar? Registered in the offshore haven the British Virgin Islands, its ownership would have remained hidden were it not for public documents filed by Camrose reflecting a charge – the equivalent of a mortgage – as security for Vipar's loan. It described Vipar as an affiliate of Africa Management Limited.
Tokyo et al.
The latter needs no introduction. Africa Management was set up the previous year, 2007, as a joint venture between Sexwale investment vehicle Mvelaphanda Holdings, its associate company Palladino Holdings, and Och-Ziff Capital Management, a $30-billion New York hedge fund.
Set up largely to pursue resource investments in Africa, Africa Management's business model was described by one observer as: "Och-Ziff brings the money; they [Mvela and Palladino] bring the political solutions."
Corporate documents, some leaked and some open source, make it possible to reconstruct further terms: Och-Ziff stumped up a large amount, of which $150-million was on-lent by Africa Management, through its special purpose vehicle Vipar, to Gertler's Camrose.
This tied Sexwale's fortunes, together with those of his partners in Africa Management, to those of Gertler.
Sexwale declined to comment, saying through a spokesperson: "It is reiterated that no response will be entertained in respect of operations and activities of companies that the minister is no longer in charge of."
At the time of the loan, Sexwale was still executive chair of Mvela. After his appointment to Cabinet in 2009, trusts associated with him retained their beneficial interest in Mvela.
More than a loan
In the two years following Sexwale and his associates' loan to Camrose in 2008, Gertler was associated with several alleged grabs and flips, enhancing his reputation as a businessman who used his close relationship with Kabila and Kabila's now late adviser Augustin Katumba Mwanke to profit from privileged access to DRC assets.
Seen from a distance, Sexwale and his associates were no more than arms-length lenders through Vipar to Gertler. But on closer examination the $150-million loan was secured in a way that made it more of a co-investment, giving them significant rights to Camrose even though Gertler was the formal owner.
At the time of the loan, Camrose amended its incorporation documents to reflect the relationship. Significantly, Vipar was entitled to convert its loan to equity, making it a full co-owner. But in the absence of it doing so it still had rights, including:
* It was party to a shareholders' agreement with Gertler;
* It held the right to appoint an observer to Camrose's board
* It was party to the creation of a three-year business plan for Camrose, helping to devise its strategic direction; and
* Gertler needed Vipar's consent before any Camrose shares or assets could be sold.
In this light, it may be asked what insight Sexwale and his associates had into Gertler's more controversial activities, and whether they should not have extricated themselves as the reputational risk grew.
Kolwezi grab
Two years and a month after Sexwale and company had invested with Gertler, he perfected the alleged heist that caused the greatest uproar from anti-corruption campaigners.
In brief:
* Toronto-listed First Quantum Minerals (alongside South Africa's Industrial Development Corporation and DRC state miner Gecamines, among others) owned the prized Kolwezi copper and cobalt tailings project in south-eastern DRC.
* By late 2009 First Quantum had, according a subsequent court filing, spent $430-million readying Kolwezi for production, which was imminent. But it came under increasing pressure from the authorities, who unceremoniously revoked its concession in January 2010 and passed it on to a new joint venture encompassing state-owned Gecamines (30%) and the mysterious Highwind group of companies (70%), registered in the British Virgin Islands.
* By August 2010, Gertler presided over a simultaneous set of transactions that saw both the completion of the grab and the flip, as follows: Camrose – the Gertler company in which Sexwale and company had invested – acquired the Highwind group and then sold half of Camrose to the London-listed Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation – so putting Eurasian and Gertler in joint control of Kolwezi
* Eurasian faced heated criticism as it appeared to have enabled even the initial grab through the back flow of its purchase consideration of $175-million – which happened to be way below the many hundreds, if not billions of dollars Kolwezi was worth by then.
* Even Eurasian appeared concerned, filing a "suspicious activity report" with British authorities as required under anti-corruption legislation. The report said: "There is a risk that the assets of the Highwind group may have been obtained by corruption and the transaction [Eurasian's acquisition of half of Camrose] may facilitate the acquisition, retention, use or control of criminal property by the Highwind Group-Dan Gertler and others, and may result in corrupt payments being made to public officials."
Exit Sexwale
But what of Sexwale, his associates and their loan? The question remains how Gertler could have pulled off the transaction without their knowledge – he even used Camrose, over which they had say, for its completion.
But perhaps to their credit, they exited Camrose in the same transaction, transferring the loan obligation to another Gertler company, its repayment guaranteed by Eurasian.
The loan is due for repayment two years on – next week.
Labels: DAN GERTLER, DIAMONDS, TOKYO SEXWALE
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COMMENT - Dan 'Mr Diamond' Gertler was involved with the illegal ZAMTEL sale to the Libyan state's LAP Green (during the rule of Muammar Ghadaffi), through
his RP Capital Partners. I did not remember he was also an intermediary/front for Glencore International, in which future 5th Baron Rothschild Nat Rothschild is a big investor and business partner (
1,
2,
3,
4). Dan Gertler is a
partner with Glencore in Nikanor PLC. Certainly the secrecy surrounding the ZAMTEL sale will make the secrecy among his many other deals feel familiar. Of course Glencore is famous for it's tax evasion at Mopani mine. The sale of Zamtel to the Libyans only makes sense after the destruction of Libya as an independent state under Muammar Ghadaffi, by NATO. Glencore also grabbed 75% of Sudan's oil, and I'm sure they are going for 100%. Read more about Glencore in the DRC in:
GLENCORE'S CRIMES: Contracts, human rights and taxation: How a company exploits a country. To Glencore I say: you're a public company now, welcome to the Information Age.
press releaseGlobal Witness is today
calling on Glencore to explain potentially corrupt deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is calling on the company to provide more details about its relationship with an Israeli businessman who is key to its substantial mining investments in the country. The concerns,
detailed in a briefing for Glencore's shareholders, are being published on
the day of the company's first AGM as a publicly listed company.Since 2010 a number of offshore companies associated with Dan Gertler - a businessman and f
riend of Congolese President Joseph Kabila - have
secretly bought stakes in several mines from the state, paying only a small fraction of their commercially estimated values. The mines were
sold without public tenders and
limited details were only released
long after the assets were sold off.
After buying the assets, at least two of the offshore companies made huge profits by selling on shares in them soon afterwards. Others are positioned to profit by collecting the mining revenues.
Some of the proceeds of mining sales in 2011 were used by the Congolese government to cover costs related to the 2011 election, which returned incumbent president Joseph Kabila to power. The polls were condemned as flawed by international diplomats and election observers and were marred by killings committed by government security forces.
Mr Gertler and Glencore have challenged Global Witness's facts as laid out in the briefing, and their views are reflected in the note. A spokesman for Mr Gertler has questioned the commercial valuations for some of the mines concerned, while both Glencore and Mr Gertler's representatives categorically deny any involvement in corruption in Congo.
"Glencore's business in Congo is intimately tied up with a controversial friend of the president," said Daniel Balint Kurti, Campaign Leader for the Democratic Republic of Congo at Global Witness. "In a country endowed with vast mineral wealth and yet ranked by the UN as the least developed nation in the world, the company owes its shareholders and, more importantly, the people of Congo, an explanation of exactly who now owns their natural resources."
Mr Gertler is a key intermediary through whom Glencore has acquired stakes in Congolese mining assets. He is also a partner in all three mining ventures in Congo in which Glencore has acquired stakes that have been collectively valued at an estimated $4.6 billion. Two of those ventures, the Kansuki and Mutanda mines, together are expected to add at least 40% to the world's cobalt output and increase Congo's copper production by about 40% (compared to 2011 production figures) once they are fully developed.
Global Witness is asking Glencore and Mr Gertler to release the full list of shareholders of all the offshore companies involved - information which is currently secret. Global Witness believes there is a risk that the shareholders could include corrupt Congolese government officials or their proxies.
"Congo's natural resource wealth should benefit the country as a whole," said Balint-Kurti. "Yet hugely profitable deals are being struck in Congo by secretive offshore companies and multinationals; the Congolese state is getting peanuts and we are extremely concerned that the Congolese people are being deprived of billions of dollars."
As the world's largest commodity-trading firm, Glencore's behaviour helps set the standard for how commodities companies operate across the world. It boasts that it "will not assist any third party in violating the law in any country, nor pay or receive bribes, nor participate in any other criminal, fraudulent or corrupt practice".
"It is now incumbent upon Glencore to show that it is living up to its rhetoric and that it is ready to make public the details of its previously secret business deals," concluded Balint-Kurti.
Labels: CORRUPTION, DAN GERTLER, DRC, GLENCORE INTERNATIONAL AG, GLOBAL WITNESS (NGO), JOSEPH KABILA, MINING
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UPDATE:
Check out this page on The Zambian Economist blog, and this footage from MuviTV. There was no evaluation of ZAMTEL by RP Capital Partners, the Zambian government paid more for it than it received, and they recommend banning RP Capital and Simmons and Simmons from ever doing business in Zambia again. They also recommend firing the entire RP Capital endorsed new management of ZAMTEL and reinstating the old board.
Inquiry recommends termination of Zamtel sale agreements
By Chibaula Silwamba and Chiwoyu Sinyangwe
Wed 23 Nov. 2011, 13:59 CAT
THE Sebastian Zulu-led commission of inquiry has recommended the termination of agreements relating to the sale of Zamtel's 75 per cent shares to LAP Green Network for US$257 million, according to a highly-placed government source.
But LAP Green says it will "work diligently to protect its interests" as the reversal of the sale of the country's sole total telecommunications provider beckons. And the commission of inquiry recommended that RP Capital must immediately be barred from conducting business in Zambia.
The Zambian government last year sold Zamtel's 75 per cent shares at US$257 million about K1.3 trillion to Libya's LAP Green Network but the former paid US$ 334 million about K1.7 trillion to retain its remaining 25 per cent shares in the telecommunication company during the privatisation.
The source said the commission of inquiry recommended the immediate termination of LAP Green-appointed and seconded directors and management to comply with the UN sanctions on the Libyan firm, among other reasons.
"Yes, the commission of inquiry recommended the immediate termination of all agreements relating to the sale of Zamtel to LAP Green and the immediate return of 100 per cent of Zamtel to Zambians. The reasons the commission has given for this recommendation is that LAP Green had failed all the three mandatory prequalification criteria rendering the transaction null and void," the source said.
"The other reason is that the price at which Zamtel was sold obviously showed that the company was grossly undervalued and the government paid more than it received from their sale. Actually, the commissioners indicated that the government paid LAP Green to receive a gift of 75 per cent of Zamtel."
The source said the commission had discovered that the Zambia Development Agency (ZDA) negotiating team was not independent as required by the law and did not negotiate in the best interest of Zambia.
The source said this resulted in Zambia receiving the same amount of money equivalent to the amount paid to a single consultant - RP Capital Advisors - for the sale of Zamtel.
"It also recommended the immediate reconstitution of the board of Zamtel and a thorough and comprehensive audit of the company for the period after privatisation," the source said.
"On RP Capital, the recommendation of the commission of inquiry was that a civil lawsuit be immediately instituted to recover the excess fees paid to RP Capital. It also recommended that RP Capital, its affiliates and employees must be immediately barred from conducting business in Zambia. It was also recommended that a civil lawsuit be immediately instituted against RP Capital and Simmons and Simmons for professional misconduct and negligence in qualifying LAP Green despite LAP Green's failing of all the three mandatory prequalification criteria."
The source said the commission of inquiry also recommended a review of all the legislative changes made to accommodate the Zamtel transaction at the expense of Zambian taxpayers.
"The changes the commission talked about in its recommendation were issues like the reduction of mobile licence fees, the international gateway fees, the public switched telephone network exclusivity licences and the barring of a fourth mobile operator," the source said.
"In fact, the commission of inquiry concluded that the Zamtel sale was a clear case of economic sabotage which pervaded and compromised key government institutions to the extent that the government decisions and policy were being managed by a foreign consultant. It further states that the full extent and continuing effect of these actions can only be determined if a full scale and thorough comprehensive forensic audit of the Zamtel privatisation process is instituted."
The source said the commission of inquiry also recommended that the ZDA senior management must be held fully responsible and culpable for the grossly negligent and cavalier manner in which it conducted and oversaw the sale of Zamtel.
"In fact, the recommendation is that Zambia Development Agency should immediately account for and render the balance of government proceeds received for the privatisation of Zamtel and must immediately transfer the same to the government," the source said.
"It also recommended that the ZDA must forthwith focus on monitoring Zamtel post privatisation as provided in the ZDA Act. The other aspect of interest is that the internal RP Capital documents projected that the value of Zamtel in 2015 would be in excess of US$ 5 billion about K25 trillion and this is a benefit which Zambians would not enjoy because of the fraudulent sale of the company."
The source said the commission of inquiry had noted that due to the problems LAP Green was facing in its investments in Uganda Telecom in Uganda, Rwandatel in Rwanda, Sonitel & Sahelcom in Niger, Oricel in Ivory Coast and Ambitel in Sierra Leone, it was clear that in its three-year history, the Libyan firm had proved to be inept and incompetent at running telecommunications networks.
"If you remember the immediate-past minister of commerce, trade and industry Felix Mutati had ridiculed people that ‘I don't see how releasing the RP Capital report will help the citizen because they will not even understand it, it is just figures on paper, I would advise people to instead listen to the rational explanation of the government over the Zamtel sale'," the source said.
"But the commission of inquiry concluded that in view of its findings, had the full and comprehensive report done by RP Capital been released, the Zambian public would have drawn logical conclusions regarding the conduct and execution of the Zamtel sale."
But in a statement, Lap Green condemned the likely reversal of its acquisition of the controversial stake in Zamtel last year.
"Lap Green, a pan-African telecommunications group, owned by LAP, has expressed concern on the process for the review of Zamtel sale and its potential reversal and it will work diligently to protect its interest as it confirms Lap Green's participation in the international bid for the telecommunications operator was done strictly following the legal framework as other participants in the process," stated Lap Green in an emailed statement.
[The Libyans should put their own house in order first. They think that they can murder an entire town of Africans, that 'whatever happens in Tawergha stays in Tawergha', and that there will be no repercussions? That they can conduct 'business as usual' in Africa? I don't think so. Besides, senior members of their government like Belhadj are 'former' members of Al-Qaeda and have close ties to the Taliban. Why would anyone in Africa want to do business with these genocidal maniacs? Why do the US, UK and France support them? Or has Al-Qaeda always been a US/CIA/ISI sponsored front group? - MrK]
Labels: CORRUPTION, DAN GERTLER, FELIX MUTATI, LAP GREEN, RP CAPITAL PARTNERS, ZAMTEL
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COMMENT - Interesting that Keith Harmon Snow links Jendayi Frazer to Beny Steinmetz and Dany Gertler (who was behind the sale of Zambia's state telco ZAMTEL to the Libyan government of President Ghadaffi's LAP Green investment fund).
Jendayi Frazer, through Wikileaks, who President Mugabe labeled
"a little prostitute", has been shown to have been
behind Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia. Belgian Paratroopers to Crush Rising Congo Rebellion? Part III
By Keith Harmon Snow
Keith Harmon Snow is a war correspondent, photographer and independent investigator, and a four time (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) Project Censored award winner. He is also the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies.
Mobutu Sese Seko's Ghosts Brazzaville has harbored Mobutu’s ex-Forces Armées Zaïroises (ex-FAZ) since 1996-1997, and it harbors Rwandan elements that fled the AFDL genocide against Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire (1996-1997). Sources suggest there are at least 300 ex-MLC and more than 10,000 ex-FAZ troops available for the Dongo rebellion.
Rwandan refugees in Congo-Brazza include civilian survivors of the 1994 exodus from Rwanda and the subsequent international war crimes committed by the Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe and their troops in DRC from 1996-1998. Uganda People’s Defense Forces also helped hunt and massacre Hutu refugees.
Congo-Brazzaville also supports the ex-Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR) and their allies, the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), providing a distant rear base for Congo operations directed at liberating Rwanda from the extremist Tutsis and the Kagame dictatorship. 11
Thus many Rwandan refugees in Brazzaville are former liberation fighters hostile to the terrorist Kagame regime for its ‘blame-the-victims’ inversion of the Rwanda ‘genocide’ story and the mass murder of millions of Hutu people from 1990 to the present.
As of 2005, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) counted some 59,000 Congo-Kinshasa refugees in Congo-Brazzaville and more than 4000 Congo-Kinshasa refugees in C.A.R. 12
Sassou-Nguesso, Dos Santos, Ali Bongo and his father Omar, Mobutu, Habyarimana—all of these current and former Central African regimes align(ed) themselves with French and Israeli security and intelligence interests 13—and all seek to counter balance and limit Tutsi extremist expansionism in Central Africa backed by the Anglo-American alliance.
Equateur Province is the site of major untapped petroleum reserves. Belgian, French, Portuguese, German and U.S. families and corporations control vast tracts of land being denuded by rapacious industrial logging. There are also western-owned plantations with modern day plantation slavery involving tens of thousands of Congolese people subject to terrorism by state paramilitary services.
The outside world hears little or nothing about the western-owned logging and plantation concessions producing timber, coffee, cocoa, palm oil, and rubber through modern day slavery. Similarly, the immense untapped petroleum reserves beneath the Congo River basin and its rainforests in Equateur province remain undisclosed by western institutions—including World Wildlife Fund (WWF), USAID, and Care International—involved in possessing and depopulating these rainforest lands for western corporate interests that benefit through the Kabila regime.
According to Congo researcher David Barouski, cassiterite (tin) mined from the bloody Kivu provinces in eastern Congo also passes through the networks of the plantations and logging interests in Equateur and Orientale.
“Outside of Asia, Belgium is the primary importer of Congolese cassiterite. Sodexmines sells to SDE, located in Brussels and directed by Mr. Edwin Raes. SDE is a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Elwyn Blattner Group. Mr. Elwyn Blattner, who hails from Bayonne, N.J, owns several businesses in the Congo through his firm, African Holding Company of America. They include logging concessions, transportation, and palm oil plantations. The products [from] these businesses are also imported by SDE.”14
The Elwyn Blattner Groupe has supported all sides in Congo’s wars, bankrolling combatants, police, governors and officials who control the geographical areas where his interests are. The Blattner family—James, Elwyn, Daniel, David—began and expanded under Mobutu and are entrenched with the Kabila regime.15
Assasins target Joseph Kabila Kanambe
Recognizing the growing disaffection amongst his own military and intelligence services, President Kabila is surrounded by trusted elite Angolan Special Forces.
Since Joseph Kabila came to power in 2001, the elite Guard Républicaine (GR) controlled directly by the President outside the military chain of command or any civilian or judicial oversight, has been expanded to some 15,000 elite, heavily armed forces deployed at all strategic locations around the country. Sources in the intelligence sector in Congo-Kinshasa claim that the GR is predominantly comprised of elite Angolan Special Forces, with a token number of Congolese to put a proper face on things.
In 2005, it was reported that Kabila’s closest security detail in the Presidential Guards was a detachment of 50 elite Zimbabwe Defense Forces under the command of Lt. Colonel Richard Sauta, a 5th dan (rank) Tae Kwan Do expert trained in North Korea.16
Kabila has also reportedly moved all ammunitions depots off Congolese FARDC military bases in Kinshasa, though Rwandan FARDC (‘ex’-CNDP) and Angolan troops remain heavily armed and supplied.
The view looking across the Congo River from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, showing Kinshasa’s transshipment port for timber exploitation and export to Europe, Asia & North America. Photo keith harmon snow 2006.
Angolan troops backed Kabila during the deadly battle for Kinshasa against Jean-Pierre Bemba and MLC loyalists in March 2007. Enraged by MLC attacks that claimed some 23 Angolans, including a senior officer, the Angolan forces ruthlessly retaliated, causing massive civilian casualties thousands of bodies were collected and dumped in mass graves and in the Congo River.17 At the time, President Dos Santos convinced Congo-Brazzaville president Dennis Sassou-Nguesso to block ex-FAZ troops in Brazzaville from crossing the Congo River to join the MLC fight.
This time, Sassou-Nguesso has allowed ex-FAZ and ex-MLC to cross the border and join the Dongo rebellion.
Since March 2007, MLC forces that were captured or surrendered to MONUC after the deadly battle were detained by MONUC in Kinshasa ‘for their own safety’. In past weeks, Kabila’s loyalist forces in Kinshasa seized some of the MLC captives in military operations described by Kinshasa intelligence insiders as ‘staged assaults.’
Sources claim that MONUC has collaborated with the Kabila security apparatus in their efforts to seize and eliminate MLC captives. These captives included some 150 former combatants, along with their wives and children. Reports from Kinshasa suggest that these MLC are being systematically eliminated in what amount to extrajudicial executions.
“MONUC tried to get these MLC soldiers ‘integrated’ into the FARDC because they [MONUC] knew that Kabila would have them [MLC] killed,” says an insider in Kinshasa. “In June, officers from MONUC wanted to transfer the Bemba MLC men in secret to Kabila. Bemba’s men refused and took MONUC soldiers hostage and MONUC had to negotiate for their release. Now, Kabila’s Presidential militia have forced the door and arrested Bemba soldiers. MONUC seemed to pretend not to know what was happening. We know that between 80 and 103 people from MLC have been arrested by the Presidential Guard.”
There have been massive arrests and illegal detentions of young men in Kinshasa and outlying areas in the past month. In the past week, Congolese newspapers reported that escaped prisoners had been shot. However, sources indicate that these ‘escapees’ were killed in prison.
Such actions are routine for the Kinshasa security apparatus. Any time that Kabila suspects or discovers a coup, street children and young men are rounded up and detained, often involving intimidation and beatings, by the Presidential Guard.
Sources in Kinshasa also say that Kabila’s forces rounded up scores and possibly hundreds of young civilian men in Maluku, a former Jean-Pierre Bemba MLC stronghold some 70 kilometers from Kinshasa. Kabila is worried that an insurgency against him will come from Maluku.
Kabila has good reason to be alarmed. There have been at least four serious coup attempts against Kabila over the past two years; two of these occurred in 2009.
One recent unreported coup attempt occurred in Kinshasa on May 18, 2009 at 7:30 pm when Kabila was returning from Mbakana, reported to be the Kabila clan’s privately fortified ‘farm’ security compound also some 70 kilometers from Kinshasa.
When the presidential procession set off down the Boulevard de 30 Juin, Kinshasa’s central artery, on May 18 a sniper, lying in ambush, opened fire on the presidential Mercedes Jeep at the intersection of Wangata Avenue. Kabila had switched vehicles and was riding in a Nissan Patrol like those used by members of parliament. Following the attack, Kabila ordered the systematic destruction of all the public kiosks and pavilions along the Boulevard de 30 Juin, and the indiscriminate round up and arrest of young men in Kinshasa. The attack reportedly involved five commandos.
All media inside Congo were forbidden from reporting on the May coup attempt, reportedly on the personal orders of President Kabila. Several media outlets of the Congolese Diaspora reported the events. It is also true that ‘coups’ and ‘attacks’ in Kinshasa have been staged by the Kabila government and by opposition as devices to manipulate public opinion or justify retaliatory action.
In October 12, 2009, Colonel Floribert Bofate Lihamba was arrested in Lubumbashi, Katanga Province, the heart of Congo’s most lucrative western mining operations, and transferred to a prison in Kinshasa. A top security agent in President Kabila’s Presidential Guard Républicaine (GR), and a former member of the Special Presidential Security Group (GSSP) under President Laurent Kabila, Col. Lihamba is accused of planning a coup d’etat.
On October 21, 2009, President Kabila survived the second most recent attempted coup d’etat, another recent pivotal event in Congo unreported by the western press or Congolese media. Informed in advance of the impending attempt on his life, President Kabila had curtailed all public appearances and was reportedly again holed up with Angolan troops on his ‘farm’ security compound outside Kinshasa.
According to Congolese intelligence sources, ex-Forces Armées Zaïroises (ex-FAZ) commandoes crossed the Congo River seeking to assassinate Kabila. The commandoes all reportedly originate from the Mobutu and Jean-Pierre Bemba strongholds around Gbadolite , in northwestern Equateur.
The arrested officers include: four Majors (Yogo, Zwafunda, Mokwesa, Ngombo); five captains (Koli, Nzale, Gbaka, Kongawi, and Salakoso); nine lieutenants (Libanza, Masisi, Gerembaya, Mbuyi, Ndongala, Ngani, Kpdobere, Nzanzu and Sido); and four sergeants (Kongo, Dondo, Lisala, and Lite).
“President Kabila is afraid of the ex-FAZ,” says one Congolese source. “He is afraid of Ngbanda.”
One of the former President Mobutu’s closest advisers, Honoré Ngbanda—the ‘Terminator’—is also rumored to back the uprising in Dongo. Ngbanda held various positions under Mobutu, including Minster of the Interior, Ambassador to Israel and Head of the Mobutu’s notorious SNIP, the National Intelligence and Protection Service (Service National d'Intelligence et de Protection).
Honoré Ngbanda’s ties to other Mobutu era big men likely include the Bongo family (Gabon) and Jewish-American diamond kingpin Maurice Templesman (United States), whose De Beers-affiliated diamond interests were partially displaced when the Kabila regime partnered with Israeli businessmen Dan Gertler and Benny Steinmetz. Gertler and Steinmetz cemented their interests in Congo-Kinshasa through former U.S. President G.W. Bush and former U.S. State Department official Jendayi Frazer.
South Africa is home to several former high commanders from the former Mobutu regime of Zaire. Former Security Police Chief General Kpama Baramoto, former Special Forces Commander General Ngabale Nzimbi and former Zairean Defense Minister Admiral Mudima all now reside in South Africa and are clearly interested in overthrowing Joseph Kabila.
In past weeks, Kabila has attempted to replace Congolese intelligence agents with Rwandans drawn from the CNDP, the extremist Tutsi terrorist network out of Rwanda. This has stirred further anger amongst the Congolese members of the FARDC and the National Intelligence Agency (ANR), Congo-Kinshasa’s secret service.
Two young women in a remote village in Equateur province. The average Congolese citizen is innocent of all involvement of war and plunder, never had much of anything for consumer goods, and retains a lovely sense of self, rich with compassion, dignity, truth and courage. These are the victims of the unholy western warfare alliances in Central Africa. Photo keith harmon snow, Equateur Province, DRC, 2004.
“The CNDP is a rebellion that Kagame used, and Kabila allowed, to infiltrate Rwandan soldiers into the Congolese [FARDC] army,” reports an intelligence insider in Kinshasa. “These CNDP are described as Congolese Tutsis but they are Rwandans. The fact that Kabila tried to replace some members of secret services and [FARDC] army by people who came from CNDP [provoked] the anger of many in the Congolese army and intelligence services. Kabila will be captured or killed very soon. TRUST ME.”
To be continued.
Footnotes
11Interviews with Rwandans in the Diaspora, keith harmon snow.
12United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
13See keith harmon snow, “The Crimes of Bongo: Apartheid & Terror in Africa’s Gardens of Eden,” Cyrano’s Journal Online, July 17, 2009, .
14David Barouski, “Transcript of David Barouski’s 10/19/08 Presentation for Congo Week in Chicago, IL.,” World News Journal, October 22, 2008, .
15Elwyn Blattner and his plantations holdings are revealed in the 2008 documentary film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty by Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens, .
16Wilf Mbanga, Zimbabwe/DRC: Zimbabwean troops guards President Kabila in Congo, The Zimbabwean/UK, August 12, 2005, .
17See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 19, 2007, .
Labels: BENY STEINMETZ GROUP RESOURCES, DAN GERTLER, DRC, JENDAYI FRASER, TIMBER
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Canadian paper links Gertler to DRC's new Kolwezi acquirer
By: Matthew Hill
18th June 2010
TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Dan Gertler, the Israeli diamond magnate, has turned up in a new Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) mining-related report.
Canada's Financial Post reported this week that the Kolwezi copper tailings project, which the government took away from TSX-listed First Quantum Minerals in September, is now in the hands of a British Virgin Islands company called Highwinds Properties. The report then cited unnamed sources linking Highwinds to Gertler, who was a major shareholder in DRC copper-miner Nikanor, which merged with Katanga Mining in 2007.
First Quantum watched last year as the DRC government withdrew the mining licence for the Kolwezi tailings project, saying the company violated an agreement. Then, earlier this year, the DRC Surpreme Court withdrew two more of First Quantum's licences in the country, Frontier and Lonshi.
Gertler is reportedly close to DRC President Joseph Kabila, having been invited to his wedding.
But First Quantum is not backing down without a fight. It has used strong language against the DRC government and has taken the dispute to international arbitration.
In May, chairperson and CEO Philip Pascall made the company's intentions clear: "We are extremely concerned with the orchestrated attack on the company's Frontier and Lonshi operations in the DRC in obvious retaliation for our commencement of international arbitration with respect to the illegal cancellation of our Kolwezi project and our refusal to resolve this dispute by agreeing to submit to arrangements with unspecified third parties.
"We will also take all necessary legal measures to protect our mining rights and property and pursue damages against any third-party interfering with our legal rights."
Pascall did not offer any explanation as to what he meant by "third party interferences".
There are also worries over whether Freeport-McMoran's $2-billion Tenke Fungurume copper project in the DRC might suffer the same fate as First Quantum's. This is the last contract to be reviewed by the government.
The mining licence review process that the DRC government embarked on in 2007 sent jitters through the industry, and for good reason it seems.
Adding further uncertainty, Reuters reported this week that the country's government would consider new legislation giving the State a 35% shareholding in all future mining projects in the DRC.
The Financial Times said in May that First Quantum's plight is a "much-watched barometer of investment risk" in the DRC. So far, the events that have unfolded cannot have evoked much confidence amongst potential investors.
All this, while copper prices trade at around $6 500/t, more than double their 2008 lows.
Labels: DAN GERTLER, DIAMONDS, HIGHWINDS PROPERTIES, JOSEPH KABILA, NIKANOR
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Dan Gertler
From SourceWatch
Gertler and Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch "are two of the principals behind a diamond mining company, Emaxon Finance Corporation, involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)...
"Back in 2000, former Congolese president Laurent Kabila offered a monopoly on Congolese diamonds, and 88% of the proceeds, to Gertler’s International Diamond Industries (IDI) in exchange for Israeli military assistance to his new government...
"The original Gertler-Kabila deal fell through after Laurent Kabila was assassinated for not cooperating with the Great White Fathers of industry (January 2001), but Gertler and Leibovitch and their disciples formed another company, Dan Gertler International, and advanced their Congo plan.22 By 2002 Gertler’s company was the leading exporter of Congolese gems, controlling a diamond mining franchise worth about $US 1 billion annually...
"Dan Gertler is close to Israeli politicians, especially Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and he is very close to diamantaire Beny Steinmetz, a good friend of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Gertler’s inseperable friend, Chaim Leibovitz, is also very close to Lieberman, and was “a regular fixture” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offices." [1]
"Founder of the DGI Group of Companies, Dan Gertler is a leader in the development of natural resources. His career began with investments in the diamond trade in Africa, and his interests have since grown to include mining, logistics, real estate, agriculture and finance in Africa and other emerging markets.
"Born in December 1973, Dan Gertler is the grandson of Moshe Schnitzer, who was the founder and first President of the Israeli Diamond Exchange and 2004 winner of the Israel Prize (the most prestigious award issued by the State of Israel) for lifetime achievement in recognition of his contribution to Israeli society and the State...
"An enthusiastic diamond-dealer from youth, Mr. Gertler learned the secrets of the trade not only from his father but also from his grandfather’s life-long experience. He spent time with both of them during school holidays and whenever else he was able. Even while carrying out his three-year mandatory service in a rearguard base of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) near Tel Aviv, all of his free time was spent either at the offices of his father or grandfather, learning and practicing the essentials of the diamond business...
"Following experiments with the purchase and marketing of artisinally mined diamonds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DGI established a partnership with the majority state-owned diamond mine MIBA...
"Mr. Gertler’s record in the DRC not only gives him a unique view and understanding of its authorities and infrastructure, but also earned him the trust and goodwill required to build business interests of the magnitude that he has. Mr. Gertler was named honorary consul of the DRC in Israel in April 2003." [2]
In June 2008 "A company controlled by Israeli diamond mogul Dan Gertler is taking a 25 per cent stake in Anvil Mining Ltd. (TSX:AVM), a Montreal-based copper and silver producer.
"Anvil said Thursday it has an agreement in principal that would give the Gertler family trust a 25 per cent stake and one seat on its board of directors in return for nearly C$296.7 million cash...
"In April, privately held Camrose Resources, of which Gertler is a major shareholder, said it is taking a 63 per cent stake in miner Africo Resources Ltd. (TSX:ARL).
"In 2004, BHP Billiton rejected an attempt by Gertler to buy the Ekati mine in the Northwest Territories, Canada's first producing diamond mine." [3]
"Dan Gertler’s father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that spends more money promoting the false image of “conflict-free” diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry." [4]
Labels: BLOOD DIAMONDS, DAN GERTLER, DIAMONDS, DRC, LAURENT KABILA
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RP Capital submits preliminary report on evaluation of Zamtel
Written by Katwishi Bwalya
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 4:05:39 PM
RP Capital Partners of Cayman Islands has submitted a preliminary report to government on the evaluation of Zamtel assets, communications and transport deputy minister Mubika Mubika has disclosed.
Mubika, who described the report as good, said once the full report from RP Capital Partners of Cayman Islands is submitted, the government would then make a decision on the future of Zamtel.
“The report so far is very good. I can't disclose any thing [which is] in the report. They are still finalising, but I am sure we are going to have a true picture of the value of Zamtel. Yes, they are almost complete and genuine people are going to see why we engaged RP Capitals,” Mubika said when he appeared on Sunday's Government and You programme on Radio Phoenix.
Mubika said once a full report is submitted, the government would announce to the nation the true value of Zamtel. He said the intention to engage RP Capital Partners was good.
“The intention on Zamtel is very good. It's just a pity that there were some hidden agenda that some people were targeting but otherwise, my minister [Dora Siliya] was in the right directions,” he said.
“This company has assets all over the country; this is why we engaged RP Capital. What we want as government is to have the value of Zamtel so if it means partial privatisation or whatever we are able to decide, we are able to know the current price of the company so the workers should know that we don't want to make mistakes which other people have made before us because this is why we have been complaining about UBZ [United Bus Company]. We have so many companies which were sold for a song, even the mines. We made all those mistakes which came because we were selling without knowing the value, so even on Zamtel the intentions by my former minister was good. It was intended for the government to know the current value of Zamtel,” Mubika said the evaluation of Zamtel was in the interest of workers.
He, however, said the bad working culture by Zamtel workers had also contributed to the problems being faced by Zamtel.
He said whatever the outcome, the government would not lay off workers unnecessarily.
Labels: DAN GERTLER, MUBIKA MUBIKA, RP CAPITAL PARTNERS, ZAMTEL
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A corrupt president is a guarantee for a corrupt govt
Written by Editor
Dora Siliya’s dealings with RP Capital Partners Limited amount to corruption. And in defending her, Rupiah Banda and George Kunda were defending corruption. And when we talk about corruption, we include arrogance, lack of humility, abuse of office.
It cannot be denied that Dora was arrogant, lacked humility and abused her office in her dealings with RP Capital Partners Limited and in her defence of her deals with them. And Rupiah and George abused their offices and other public institutions to defend Dora’s corrupt dealings with RP Capital Partners Limited.
They even abused, and continue to abuse, the state-owned and government-controlled media organisations like the Times of Zambia, the Zambia Daily Mail and ZNBC television and radio to defend their corrupt deals. This abuse of state institutions is also corruption on the part of Rupiah, George and Dora.
And Zambians should ask themselves why Rupiah Banda’s son, who is not in any way a government official, was involving himself in this matter. There is no other better explanation than that this was a corrupt scheme. And through this corrupt scheme, the Zambian people will lose US $2 million to RP Capital Partners Limited – although George lied to the nation that this deal only involves US $50,000.
This also explains why Rupiah is having problems dealing with Dora.
Clearly, a corrupt president is a guarantee of a corrupt government. When levels of corruption are high, it is possible to determine a structure of corruption that stretches from the lowliest clerk to State House, and each layer of corrupt officials blames the one above them.
Of course, we are not saying that Zambia needs a saint for a president. We know of many leaders in the world that started with very good intentions, giving anti-corruption work a high priority but, when members of their family or political allies were the target of corruption allegations, their commitment started to fade.
Fighting corruption depends partly on political will and, if the president is personally free of corruption and willing to lead a sustained attack on corruption, there is some good prospect of progress.
When corruption is pervasive and deeply entrenched, no section of society, no business sector and no social group can escape its impact. Corruption is a social and economic problem, as well as a political problem. Its containment requires the mobilisation of social and economic sectors in addition to the commitment of the political leadership.
Clearly, corruption thrives when it is accepted as a norm, when its victims do not protest, when it goes unreported and uninvestigated and when its consequences are not widely understood. We strongly believe that tackling corruption requires the participation of all – us in the media, our believers in the churches, our brothers and sisters in the trade unions, civic associations, non-governmental organisations and indeed those in business.
We have no alternative to fighting corruption if we have to harbour any hope of a reversal of fortunes in this country because corruption delays, disturbs and diverts growth and development. We have been told and reminded, time and again, that eradicating poverty requires macroeconomic stability, economic growth, improving institutional capacity, and investing in services such education and health that particularly benefit the poor.
High levels of corruption can threaten economic stability, slow down growth, weaken institutional capacity and reduce the resources available for social programmes. If macroeconomic stability can be maintained, inflation will be low which is of benefit to the poor and such stability provides a platform for economic growth.
High inflation can erode the tax base and affect the government’s ability to maintain social spending. High inflation is often a result of excessive government borrowing and, where there are high levels of corruption, politicians have personal incentives to encourage high spending levels because it provides more opportunities for them to steal, to be corrupt, to engage in deals like the RP Capital Partners Limited deal. Who knows how many people in Zambia are going to benefit from RP Capital’s US $2 million?
It is the duty of every human rights activist or institution to fight against corruption. We say this because corruption, in all its forms, constitutes a violation of the human rights of the people who experience it. Our politicians, who are complicit in corruption, are failing in their duty to protect and promote human rights. The struggle for human rights and the struggle against corruption are clearly intimately and inextricably linked because corrupt politicians and their governments are no respecters of human rights. Human rights are, by definition, general and universal while corruption, by definition, concerns the few and the particular.
Millions of our fellow citizens are denied their human rights and corruption plays an important role in perpetuating this situation. Corruption is an obstacle to the realisation of their rights; it is a denial of accountability and prevents people from exercising their political rights. When politicians are bought and sold by powerful economic interests, by foreign companies with a lot of money, when they are consumed by their own greedy and vanity, this undermines the democratic process. It also undermines equality before the law as we are seeing in Dora’s case. Imagine how Dora would have been treated if she was not an ally of Rupiah? Compare the way she is being treated with the way we have been unfairly scandalised over the problems of Zambian Airways! Human rights are an expression of a belief in the equality of human beings, of equal treatment by governments and their politicians. But corruption is an especially pernicious form of discrimination. Rupiah’s inability to deal with Dora swiftly and decisively is as a result of the corruption we are talking about.
And equally, his malicious accusation of us having stolen US $30 million from state institutions is a result of corruption on his part. There would be no purpose for corruption if all were to be treated equally. Corruption violates human rights because it discriminates against the poor by denying them access to public services and preventing them from exercising their political rights.
And business people shouldn’t cheat themselves that they are benefiting by paying bribes, by patronising politicians and giving them all sorts of gifts which amount to nothing but bribes and corruption. Corruption has a negative impact on the scale, form and growth rate of private sector development. It has both direct and indirect consequences for the conduct of business. It helps distort the market by redirecting economic activity from one sector to another. And in doing so, corruption destroys the structure and pattern of economic development and reduces the efficiency of economic activity. Corruption has fiscal, budgetary and debt effects which collectively damage the economy and make private sector development very difficult.
In its extreme form, corruption can destroy our economy and make business activity for our business people impossible. In principle, when you look at the RP Capital US $2million corrupt deal, it is an unofficial tax on the consumers and producers of this country and those least able to pay, the poor, will suffer the most from its regressive impact.
Corruption is very dangerous because it is divisive and can make a very significant contribution to social inequality and conflict in our country. It separates the poor from the rich, the observers from the players; it helps divide people on tribal or regional lines and promotes rivalries and jealousies. It was electoral corruption that made Rupiah encourage our people to be divided on regional and tribal lines. It was greed and vanity that made Rupiah tell the people of Eastern Province not to welcome but chase away other candidates who did not hail from Eastern Province when they went to campaign there.
Clearly, high levels of corruption help breed a culture of suspicion and distrust. Encounters with strangers, especially those in authority positions, are fraught with difficulty. This can actually lead to social cohesion breaking down in our country. Where there is corruption, it becomes more difficult to persuade people to work together for the common good because corruption encourages and rewards selfishness and denigrates collective action.
It cannot be denied that corruption disempowers people and encourages their sense of alienation, undermines respect for authority and increases cynicism about leaders at all levels of society. Corruption discourages participation in civil society and elevates self-interest as a guide to conduct.
As we have seen, where the belief is widespread that all politicians are crooks, it is bound to widen the gap between the political class and the rest of society. And it will stimulate people with resources to turn away from government and politics and provide their own solutions to problems. Corruption will foster an increasing withdrawal from membership of political parties and other political organisations for fear of being identified with the corrupt political class.
Where there is corruption, values suffer – they are lost; where there is corruption, standards and principles are sacrificed and substituted with personal gain. Where there is corruption, those in government are prevented or find it very difficult to implement and enforce laws and policies. Where there is corruption, the reputation of politicians is damaged and people are encouraged to go into politics for wrong reasons.
When corruption grips a nation, public trust in politicians and political institutions and processes are undermined, international confidence in government is eroded. When corruption takes root, cynicism is encouraged and political participation is discouraged. And this can give rise to political instability.
And as we saw in the last elections, corruption perverts the conduct and results of elections and ensures that the poor remain politically powerless and are forced or manipulated to vote for people they don’t even know, their votes are stolen from them in broad daylight robbery. We have also seen that corruption consolidates political power and reduces political participation. Look at what corruption is doing to the competition for power in the MMD! Those in control of state resources and can use them in a corrupt manner carry the day. Clearly, corruption delays and distorts political development and sustains political activity based on patronage and money. It also reduces the transparency of political decision making and the development of an open political system.
And it certainly erodes the political rights of the poor and reduces their political participation.
There is need for all of us, for all Zambians of good will to tenaciously fight corruption because it is the antithesis of good governance and democratic politics. We have no alternative but to fight corruption with all that we have because for all of striving to create an open, competitive and transparent form of political activity in this country, corruption offers a range of obstacles and imposes significant costs.
This is the way to look at what is happening following the Dora tribunal report. The hesitations or the difficulties Rupiah is today facing over this issue have nothing to do with legal complications as they are trying to project in their propaganda, in their continued abuse of the state -owned and government-controlled media, it has everything to do with corruption on their part.
Labels: DAN GERTLER, DORA SILIYA, PRIVATISATION, RP CAPITAL PARTNERS
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RP capital MoU was initiated in Dora’s office, reveals PS
Written by Maluba Jere
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 2:42:33 PM
THE Dora Siliya tribunal yesterday heard that the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the government and RP Capital Partners was initiated in the minister's office.
This is in a matter where former communications and transport minister William Harrington and ten civil society organisations had asked Chief Justice Ernest Sakala to set up a tribunal to investigate alleged corruption and abuse of office involving Siliya.
During examination-in-chief led by one of Harrington's lawyers, Wynter Kabimba, former permanent secretary in the Ministry of Communications and Transport Dr Eustern Mambwe told the tribunal that he had been away from the office but when he returned, he was briefed by the director of planning in the ministry that the MoU between RP Capital Partners and government was initiated in the minister's office.
Dr Mambwe explained that the board of Zamtel had earlier requested the Ministry of
Communications and Transport to assist with the restructuring of the parastatal through the Management Development Division (MDD).
He said the request was granted and a committee was put in place.
Dr Mambwe said when he returned from Tanzania, he conferred with three officials from the ministry because he wanted to be briefed on what had changed regarding Zamtel's request.
He told the tribunal that he accepted the situation after being briefed on the developments because the minister found it prudent that the contract be awarded to another company and not through MDD.
Dr Mambwe said he then wrote an internal memorandum to Siliya on the Attorney General Mumba Malila's advice.
However, Dr Mambwe explained that Siliya wrote to the director of planning to proceed with the processing of the RP Capital MoU and copied the letter to him.
He said he inquired from directors of planning and communication on whether the ministry had reacted to the legal opinion from Solicitor General Dominic Sichinga's office before proceeding with the MoU.
He told the tribunal that there was no reaction from the minister on the second legal opinion on the matter.
Dr Mambwe narrated that he then conferred with his staff and advised them on the legal opinion from Malila that the MoU was a nullity and the process must be stopped.
He told the tribunal that after he learnt that the MoU had already been signed, he called Malila to seek advice because he wanted to find out whether the MoU could still go ahead or not in view of his legal opinion.
Dr Mambwe explained that the Attorney General told him that his legal opinion was still in force until all requisites had been complied with.
He informed the tribunal that he instructed his staff as well as the director of planning to stop processing the MoU until further notice.
Dr Mambwe said he instructed the director of planning specifically because he was the officer responsible in assisting with the drafting of MoUs.
He told the tribunal that he issued those instructions not knowing that the MoU had already been signed.
Dr Mambwe further said he had never seen the MoU and that he was seeing it for the first time yesterday.
He told the tribunal that he was not aware of subsequent discussions between the ministry officials and the Attorney General's chambers leading to the signing of the MoU.
Dr Mambwe said the MoU was not in compliance with Malila's opinion.
He further told the tribunal that all documents relating to expenditure and procurement are supposed to be signed by the permanent secretary who is the controlling officer.
Dr Mambwe said the minister should refer to the permanent secretary all people who approach them for procurement and that the minister should not commit the government to any procurement.
He said as controlling officer, he never met any officials from RP Capital Partners.
Dr Mambwe expressed ignorance on whether the expenditure relating to the RP Capital MoU went to his committee for approval.
He also informed the tribunal that according to the finance Act 15 of 2004, no person representing a ministry department shall enter into an agreement committing the government to pay or receive monies unless authorised in writing by the finance minister.
Dr Mambwe said he was not aware whether that authority was granted by the finance minister.
He further denied working closely with the minister in formulating the MoU regarding RP Capital but that the director of planning may have done so.
Dr Mambwe also told the tribunal that the Secretary to the Cabinet advised the ministry to seek advice from then Zambia National Tender Board (ZNTB) on the procurement process to be undertaken.
He explained that ZNTB advised that the procurement of radars should not be single sourced.
Dr Mambwe informed the tribunal that when the Ministry of Communications and Transport sought advice from ZNTB, it did not have any particular company in mind.
He said National Airports Corporation (NAC) requested that new radar equipment be procured as opposed to repairing the old system.
Dr Mambwe expressed ignorance on whether or not Selex put in a bid after the ministry advertised for the supply of radars.
He told the tribunal that he did not know who made the decision to take out the free offer from Selex.
He said during his time as permanent secretary at the Ministry of Communications and Transport, he never came across any free offer for services.
Dr Mambwe expressed ignorance on whether Siliya had a mandate or authority to engage a tender process in the procurement Act.
He said the ZNTB interacts with the ministry's tender committee chairperson but that if the minister finds something unusual, she could ask the permanent secretary.
Dr Mambwe also said he was not aware whether or not Thales Air Systems was a middleman.
He denied having received information that the tender procedure was being interfered with by Thales Airs Systems. He also denied having any knowledge of Thales engaging in fraudulent practices with other competitors.
Dr Mambwe reiterated that his role as controlling officer is to authorise the procurement of goods and services and that the minister does not play any role.
Hearing continues to today.
Labels: DAN GERTLER, DORA SILIYA, RP CAPITAL PARTNERS, WILLIAM HARRINGTON, ZAMTEL
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Chloe's Blood Diamond - Angola Rock sold for $16 million to GUESS Jeans Founder
By Keith Harmon Snow
November 24, 2007
allthingspass.com
A huge flawless white diamond was sold on November 14 for nearly 18.2 million Swiss francs ($16.21 million) to Guess Jeans founder Georges Marciano, who named it the “Chloe Diamond” after his daughter, Sotheby's auctioneers said.
While the hot Chloe rock is certified as a “clean” diamond, it was purchased from Angola’s state mining company, Endiama, a company involved in blood diamonds. No rock of desire of this stature—84.37 carats—comes out of Africa without organized bloodshed and suffering behind it.
“For the past 20 years, bloodshed and diamond mining have been two sides of the same coin,” said Rafael Marques, a human rights activist from Angola, “violence being explained either in the name of war or of combating illegal activities.”
Marques gave a lecture titled “Rinsing the Blood from Angola’s Diamonds” at Oxford University Africa Society in January 2007. “Today, I am here to share with you a reality of blood, and contempt for human rights, in the diamond fields [of Angola].”
Angola’s state firm Endiama is tied to the Lazare Kaplan diamond company owned by the Israeli-American Tempelsman diamond cartel. Maurice Tempelsman’s diamond interests were established in the Congo in the early 1960’s with the help of the CIA.
Sotheby's luxury conglomerate identified the seller of the “Chloe” diamond as Ron Cohen, chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based company Clean Diamonds Inc. “The stone was from Angola,” Ron Cohen reportedly told Reuters. “It has gone through the Kimberley Process and has all the certificates, it is a clean diamond.”
Most media reports described Ron Cohen “as CEO of Clean Diamonds Inc. of Los Angeles,” but Reuters identified Cohen as an Israeli diamond dealer. The company “Clean Diamonds Inc.” is not found in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission database. Clean Diamonds Inc. also lists New York and Belgium operations on its web site.
“The Kimberley Process is an organization set up by the diamond industry expressly to police trade in gems,” reported Reuters, “to prevent so-called ‘blood diamonds’ used to finance rebel groups and civil wars from coming on the market.”
However, Reuters is a mainstream international news service that supports the diamond industry by covering up crimes and structural violence that keeps Africa poor. Reuters de-links the suffering and bloodshed caused by diamond cartels in major diamond producing countries like Angola, Sierre Leone, Congo, Namibia, Botswana, Liberia, Central Africa Republic, and South Africa.
At the 2007 Oxford event, Rafael Marques described the response of the diamond industry to accusations of atrocities. “There have been shifts by the central and local authorities to address the accusations, either for damage control or simply to make more sophisticated the methods of abuse by outsourcing violence to private security companies,” he said.
The brilliant-cut “Chloe” diamond, which weighs 84.37 carats, is the second most expensive stone ever sold at auction. Sotheby’s press releases describe how Cohen held the 385-carat rough stone in his hand two years ago, before it was cut, when he allegedly bought it from Endiama.
BLOOD DIAMOND CARTELS
Sotheby’s is another company involved in blood diamonds. In 2005 Sotheby’s partnered up with the Israeli-American Steinmetz Diamond Group to form Sotheby’s Diamonds. Beny and Danny Steinmetz of the Steinmetz Group are partnered with Dan Gertler, a new White House insider considered the unofficial “Ambassador” to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country cursed by diamonds and other minerals, where at least seven million people have died since 1996.
Sotheby’s sold 385 gems at the auction, for a total of 64 million Swiss francs, many being diamonds from the blood diamond economy. With the “Chloe” diamond sale the 2007 total for “Magnificent Jewels sold at Sotheby’s Switzerland” hit $106,019,622. French billionaire Francois Pinault owns Christie’s (London) and Sotheby’s (Delaware).
The Steinmetz/Gertler partnerships between them have controlling interests in Dan Gertler Industries, Steinmetz Global Resources, Nikanor and Global Enterprises Corporate (GEC), companies with massive diamond concessions in Kasai, and copper/cobalt concessions in Katanga, two provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Israeli-American diamond cartels involved in Congo are seeking to displace the diamond interests in Angola run by Israel-American Lev Leviev and Maurice Tempelsman, top-level partners of the Angolan state diamond companies.
Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first Premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth back to the newly independent Congo in the early 60’s, Tempelsman, who began with De Beers in the 1950’s, helped engineer the coup d’etat that consolidated the dictatorship of 29 year-old Colonel Mobutu, and the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah; diamonds were at stake in each.
“I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert and investigative journalist Janine Roberts, author of the book Glitter and Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression and dictatorships, in Africa.”
Maurice Tempelsman is Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it works closely with the Israeli military. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that once represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International—supplier of Tiffany’s and Cartier’s diamonds.
THE KIMBERLEY SCANDAL
In 2003 the “international community”—a conglomeration of Group of Eight (G-8) executives “partnered” with the diamond industry—established a formal mechanism ostensibly to control the flow of conflict diamonds. The United Nations mandated Kimberley Process is a voluntary self-regulation scheme where the industry crafts ‘passport’ documents certifying all stones as conflict free.
Also in 2003 the international World Diamond Council was created by the diamond industry and the U.S. Congress passed the “Clean Diamond Act.” These three formal processes falsely assure consumers that more than 99% of rough stones today come from conflict-free sources.
Since at least 1996, the campaigns of Russ Feingold (D-WI), who co-sponsored the Senate version of the U.S. “Clean Diamond Act” passed in 2003 have been heavily funded by Leon Tempelsman & Son.
Late in 2006, as the Christmas diamond rush was approaching, the film Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio provoked the World Diamond Council to launch a blitzkreig advertising campaign—full-page ads in the New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune—touting the self-policing successes of the Kimberley Process. The campaign was presumably coordinated to counter the supposed “negative publicity” of the Blood Diamond film.
The Kimberly Process was launched under the narrow definition that “conflict diamonds” only originate from conflicts between ‘rebels’ and ‘governments’: it refers to smuggling by militias antagonistic to ‘legitimate’ member governments.
After the film Blood Diamond opened in the U.S., diamond sales were never been better.
“I'm wearing diamond ear rings today because they are conflict free," actress Jennifer Connelly, who stars in Blood Diamond, reportedly said. "It would be fantastic if some of these natural resources benefited more people but until that can happen we can certainly make a stand and insist that the diamonds we wear are conflict free, which doesn't mean boycotting diamonds. It just means making sure we support a more accountable Kimberly Process."
ENDIAMA’S BLOODY DIAMOND FIELDS
Artisanal diamond miners in Angola called artisanos or garimpeiros are forced into ‘illegal’ mining because Angola’s mining security companies push people off their own land. While agriculture and commerce in the region require the direct authorization of the Provincial Governor, not one artisano has been granted a license for diamond exploration or subsistence agriculture. The ‘legitimate’ government of Angola forces desperate people to resort to ‘illegal’ activities to survive but according to Rafael Marques, garimpeiros contribute more to the profits of some of the state diamond mining firms than big industrial operations.
Three private military companies (PMCs) have been targeting garimpeiros in Angola. The mercenary firms Alfa-5, Teleservices, and K&P Mineira defend Angola’s big name diamond firms like Sociedade de Desenvolvimento Mineiro (Sodiam), Sociedade Mineira de Cuango, and Sociedade Mineira Luminas. Human rights researcher Rafael Marques has recently documented more than 50 cases of PMCs arresting, beating and torturing garimpeiros. They stop garimpeiros from fishing in their rivers, growing their own food, or living traditional lives; they have forced sexual relations on family members, including same-sex rape and sodomy.
The PMCs operate behind Angola’s public diamond company, Endiama, and have exclusive rights to Angola’s diamonds. Endiama owns 99% of shares in Sodiam, which has a joint venture with Lazare Kaplan International (LKI) of the Israeli-American Maurice Tempelsman family.
Sodiam works with the Russo-Israeli Lev Leviev Group. Endiama owns part of Alfa-5, one of the PMCs that exploit and torture garimpeiros. Alfa-5 and K&P Mineira provide security for ASCORP—the Angola Selling Corporation—another Angolan monopoly.
One of ASCORP’s controlling investors, Lev Leviev, runs a global commercial empire that includes: Leviev Group of Companies; Lev Leviev Diamonds; Africa-Israel (commercial real estate in Prague and London); Gottex (swimwear) Company; 1,700 Fina gas stations in the Southwest U.S.; 173 7-Elevens in New Mexico and Texas; a 33% stake in Cross Israel Highway (Israel’s first toll road); and more. Leviev partner Arcady Gaydamak, an arms dealer, also reportedly works with Danny Yatom, a former MOSSAD (Israeli secret service) chief and security advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Leviev is connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to Sandline International, a U.K./South African mercenary firm operating in the war-torn areas of Eastern Congo and Uganda.
While participants in the Kimberley Process complained of the criminality of UNITA, the infamous rebels once supported by the CIA, but they gave the “legitimate” Dos Santos government a sparkling bill of health. Angola exemplifies the process whereby an international certification scheme enforced by the United Nations rubber stamps boxes of rough stones according to their ‘country of origin.’ Stamped ‘Angola’ the public is assured that these diamonds are now ‘conflict free,’ because these nations are members of the Kimberley certification.
The Kimberley Process was partially instituted through the work of Robert Rotberg at Harvard University. Maurice Tempelsman chairs the International Advisory Council at the Harvard AIDS Institute (HAI) of the School of Public Health. Rotberg and Tempelsman shared a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations with people like Walter Kansteiner, National Security under Bill Clinton and current director of a gold company involved in Congo’s bloody eastern zone.
Maurice Tempelsman was for decades the unofficial ambassador to Congo/Zaire; Dan Gertler has usurped that role. In 2000 Gertler was named Honorary Consul to the Congo. Beny Steinmetz may be the biggest De Beers “sightholder”. Africa Confidential called President Kabila’s 2003 visit to the Bush White House a “coup” for Gertler and Steinmetz. Gertler’s best friend is Brooklyn-born Chaim Leibowitz, a personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.
BLOOD DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
Tempelsman and Steinmetz bought diamonds from both sides during Angola’s thirty-year war. Israeli diamond tycoons Gertler and Leviev are reportedly jockeying for power with Isabel Dos Santos, the high-rolling diamond-studded daughter of the President of Angola.
The Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv, which today brings Israel $13 billion annually in commerce, and is the country’s second-largest industry. Israel buys some 50% of the world’s rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these.
Diamonds are Israel’s top export. In 2005 figures, exports to the EU totaled $10.7 billion in 2004, including $2.5 billion in diamonds (23.3%); exports to the US totaled $14.2 billion in 2004, including $7.3 billion in diamonds (51.4%); exports to Asia totaled $7.1 billion in 2004, including $3.2 billion in diamonds (45.0%); exports to the rest of the world totaled $6.6 billion in 2004, including $800 million in diamonds (12.1%).
Dan Gertler’s grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer, is known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond,” founder of the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv. Moshe Schnitzer’s son and Dan Gertler’s uncle is Shmuel Schnitzer, Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that promotes the false image of “clean” or “conflict-free” diamonds.
In June 2002, as the Kimberley Process was unfolding, Daniel Horowitz, CEO of IDH Diamonds, gave a speech at the 3rd World Diamond Conference titled “Rough Diamonds in a Brave New World.” IDH works with Endiama, BHP-Billiton and De Beers, another of the big diamond cartels.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it would be irresponsible to circumvent the fact that it is highly problematic, if not unfeasible, to work out a system in order to control the flow of rough diamonds around the world,” Horowitz said. “The reality is that once diamonds are mined there is almost nothing one can do in order to prevent them from reaching the market. No certification scheme can truly be reliable, not only because war-torn areas are by definition disorganized, but mainly because it is intrinsically impossible to distinguish between good and bad diamonds. Misguiding traders and consumers with untrustworthy guarantees would inevitably be demystified over time. As opposed to this, it is critical to publicize that the mainstream diamond trade is legitimate. It needs to be said again and again that conflict diamonds are an irrelevant portion of world production. And as far as humanitarian issues are concerned, the added value the industry generates worldwide particularly benefits the developing world.”
Angola remains a war-torn country selling billions of dollars worth of diamonds annually. In the past four years the government of Angola has waged a permanent war against poor people, destroying thousands of homes and taking the land in mass forced evictions. People were beaten, tortured and arbitrarily arrested. At least 1000 people die in eastern Congo every day.
Millions of blood diamonds from past and current wars remain locked in the vaults of the Belgian, Russian, New York, London and Israeli diamond bourses to insure the artificially high, monopoly-fixed, prices of diamonds.
Rafael Marques outlined cases torture, brutalization and assassinations—cases of personal brutality he investigated—that characterize diamond mining by state firms in Angola today.
“Should one, after this brief explanation,” Marques asked, “say that the extraction of diamonds in Angola is OK? What the Kimberley Process, which was designed to drive blood diamonds out of the market, is doing is to rinse the blood from the gems, extracted in [Angola] and certify them as clean.”
Related Articles
Keith Harmon Snow and Rick Hines: “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception Over Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July 2007, and Blood Diamonds at .
Rafael Marques, Rinsing the Blood from Angola’s Diamonds, Oxford University Africa Society, January 26, 2007.
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Labels: BENNY STEINMETZ, BLOOD DIAMONDS, DAN GERTLER, DIAMONDS, DRC, KIMBERLEY PROCESS, MAURICE TEMPELSMAN, NEOCOLONIALISM
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COMMENT - The reason Africa is poor, is because all the money from these natural resources should be going into other economic sectors - agriculture, infrastructure and manufacturing. Instead, it goes to pad corporate bank accounts and to finance the conspicuous consumption of the few. But hey, in the words of the late Levy Mwanawasa, 'they bring jobs' instead. Dan Gertler is likely also behind the 'evalutation' and eventual 'privatisation' of ZAMTEL.
Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang
Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo (Part 1)
by Keith Harmon Snow / February 9th, 2008
Maurice Tempelsman is one of the top funders of the Democratic Party who has funded Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.1 But while the Africans are the victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible?
For Israeli-American Dan Gertler, business in blood drenched Congo is not merely business, it is a quest for the Holy Grail. Young Dan Gertler goes nowhere—does nothing—without the spiritual guidance of Brooklyn-born Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch, a personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.2 Gertler and Leibovitch are two of the principals behind a diamond mining company, Emaxon Finance Corporation, involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Gertler and gang won the majority rights to the diamonds from the state mining company, Société Minière de Bakwange, MIBA, found near the government-controlled town of Mbuji-Mayi, the rough diamond capital of the world.
Emaxon Finance Corp. has apparently out-maneuvered diamond competitors, especially the big rivals Energem and De Beers. Energem is one of the many shady mining companies connected to Anthony Teixeira, a Portuguese born businessman now residing in South Africa whose daughter married Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba. The warlord’s deadly battle in Congo in March 2007 was a bid between rival agents—Jean-Pierre Bemba and Joseph Kabila—to be the black gatekeeper for the mining cartels run by dynastic families like Templesman, Oppenheimer, Mendell, Forrest, Blattner, Hertzov, Gertler and Steinmetz, and for companies like NIKANOR, whose stock prices rose early in July 2006 in expectation of a July 30th “win” for Joseph Kabila.3 Africa Confidential called President Kabila’s 2003 visit to the Bush White House a “coup” for the Israeli diamond magnates Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz.
Canadian-based Energem, formerly DiamondWorks, is owned by British mercenary Tony Buckingham and its director/shareholders include Mario and Tony Teixeira, J.P. Morgan, and Gertler’s partner Israeli-American Beny Steinmetz (50%).4 Through subsidiary Branch Energy, the Energem-DiamondWorks gang has perpetuated war in 11 African countries.5 In December 2007, Energem re-launched itself on the London Stock Market with the newly laundered image of a renewable energy company.
Regarding diamonds, it said only it “had decided to give up exploration rights in the Central African Republic.”6 The Energem spokesman explained that Tony Teixeira “had a clean bill of health” etc., etc. Of course, Energem “quit” the C.A.R. because Jean-Pierre Bemba marched his troops into C.A.R., where they raped and pillaged widely.7 Energem is still operating in Congo, but Dan Gertler is the new, unofficial ambassador to the Congo for the George W. Bush gang.
Gertler and partners like Beny and Danny Steinmetz, Nir Livnat, Chaim Leibovitz and Yaakov Neeman run a hornet’s nest of companies involved in African hotspots, including: Dan Gertler International (DGI), Steinmetz Global Resources, International Diamond Industries, NIKANOR and Global Enterprises Corporate.
“Dan Gertler is ‘the new kid on the block,’” writes Yossi Melman in Israel’s Haaretz news. “Bold, sophisticated, brutal, he is an adventurer with a short fuse.” Haaratz confirmed that Dan Gertler owns a complex network of interconnected companies, often registered in offshore tax havens and involved in India, Russia, Belgium and the United States, and that Dan Gertler is looking to God for guidance.8
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL
“In the diamond industry,” Melman wrote, “Gertler is considered something of an odd bird. He maintains few ties with the other merchants and is not very sociable… Alongside his business affairs, most of his energy is channeled into matters of faith. He is a donor to religious institutions and from time to time makes a pilgrimage to the rabbi he most admires, Rabbi David Abuhatzeira, from Nahariya, in order to consult with him and receive his blessing. Gertler is surrounded mostly by religious people and laces his speech liberally with praise to God.”8
In 2003, Condoleeza Rice, then Assistant to President Bush for National Security Affairs, introduced Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch to U.S. official Jendayi Frazer, a Harvard Kennedy School affiliate and former National Security Council agent focused on Africa. On December 6, 2006, Frazer, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was one of seven special Bush delegates sent to the inauguration of Congo’s newly installed President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa.9
When Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch and their friends visit the luxury Gertler villa in Lumumbashi, the capital of Katanga, Congo’s large southern province, their kosher meals arrive by private plane from Kinshasa. The special executive jet that flies their kosher meals a few hundred miles over the roadless Congo costs some $US 23,000 per trip.10
The average income for Congolese citizens each year—if they survive it—is about $95. Shootings at mining facilities and diamond mines are common, land is stolen from Congolese people, strikes are crushed by security forces that companies are partnered with, and black overseers of state terror routinely arrest and torture any vocal opposition—and sometimes disappear them—in support of white bosses. The Société Minière de Bakwange—MIBA— and the diamond fields of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo have a long history of bloodshed backed by Western powers, including Israel, from the beginning.11 Amnesty International points out that not a single state agent has ever been prosecuted for the extrajudicial executions of suspected “illegal” miners in Mbuji-Mayi.12
After a century of exploitation and slavery, we find MIBA consistently withholding payment of salaries to starving Congolese laborers and middle managers for months at a time. April and May 2007 saw strikes and protests leading to the Kabila government’s arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of trade union organizers like Leon Ngoy Bululu; police have also shot protestors.13 So-called ‘illegal’ diamond workers—disenfranchised local Congolese people forced into “criminal” activities to survive—were summarily executed on MIBA concessions in Mbuji-Mayi. MIBA security guards have also been sniping unemployed diamond miners.14
Meanwhile, Dan Gertler’s kosher meals depart Kinshasa, the capital of the big Congo, through the arrangements of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, high priest of the Chabad of Central Africa. Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila has been a Kinshasa Rabbi since 1991, and he was a spiritual force who survived the terrorism of the old dinosaur, Mobutu Sese Seko, the way most elites did: by working with him. Rabbi Bentolila is a member of the Chabad Lubavitch Global Emissary Network, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and his wife Miriam is the sister of Rabbi Mena’hem Hadad, a high priest in Brussels.15
“Kosher does not mean that a Rabbi blesses the food,” Rabbi Betolila corrected me, “but rather that the food was supervised by a Rabbinical Thora [sic] authority who sees that the ingredients were in accordance with the laws of Kashrut expressed in the Bible (Leviticus and Deuteronomy).”16
Dan Gertler often flies people into Congo, on his private jet, for sacred Jewish rituals. For the Bar Mitsvah of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila’s son Binyamin Avrahim in June 2005, guests included eminent Rabbis, Hassidic singer Yoni Shlomo and special orchestra Yossef Brami, all arriving in “special flights” from Israel, New York and Brussels. The reception was held at the luxurious and exclusive Memling Hotel. Joseph Kabila sent a sizeable delegation but did not attend: his closest advisers provided a blessing on his behalf.17
The Gertler, Steinmetz and Templesman interests are advanced in part through the support of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Kinshasa—le Comité de la Communauté Israélite—that is tightly coordinated with the power structure in Kinshasa to exert influence and assure control of Israeli-Belgian-Anglo-American interests over the geopolitical arena.
From June 26-30, 2007, the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa received a visit from the Israeli Ambassador Yaakov Revah, director of the Africa Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Revah also flew to Lumumbashi for meetings with Dan Gertler and his agents, including Moishe (Moses) Katumbi, the Governor of Katanga, and they most likely enjoyed a lovely, $23,000 kosher meal sent from the Chabad in Kinshasa.18 The Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa maintains very intimate political relations with President Joseph Kabila’s PPRD party, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy. On March 1, 2006, in a formal ceremony, the President of the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa, Ashlan Piha, was awarded the Congo’s Medal of Civil Merit.
THOU SHALT NOT COVET
Before his assassination on January 16, 2001, Laurent Desire Kabila—the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—made a deal with the Gertler gang that would play out in favor of the current President Joseph Kabila and, it seems, be a central factor in relation to both Congo’s ongoing war and the bloody warlord’s battle in Kinshasa in March 2007.19
Back in 2000, former Congolese president Laurent Kabila offered a monopoly on Congolese diamonds, and 88% of the proceeds, to Gertler’s International Diamond Industries (IDI) in exchange for Israeli military assistance to his new government.20 Top Congolese military officials apparently flew to Israel in 2000 to negotiate the deal. Gertler pledged military assistance to President Laurent Kabila through top Israeli officials.21
The original Gertler-Kabila deal fell through after Laurent Kabila was assassinated for not cooperating with the Great White Fathers of industry (January 2001), but Gertler and Leibovitch and their disciples formed another company, Dan Gertler International, and advanced their Congo plan.22 By 2002 Gertler’s company was the leading exporter of Congolese gems, controlling a diamond mining franchise worth about $US 1 billion annually.23
In 2003, the mighty Congolese diamond parastatal Societe Miniere De Bakwanga (MIBA)—which has been forever controlled by the Great White Fathers in Belgium, Israel and America—signed an exclusive contract with Gertler’s startup company, Emaxon Finance International. The deal involved Israeli’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization (SIBAT), and high-level Israeli defense and intelligence officials. Gertler and his buddies reportedly bribed Congolese officials and Angolan generals who, on and off, have commanded Angolan Army troops protecting Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.21,24
Security for mining operations in Congo is provided by exclusive security companies like Overseas Security Services (OSS) one of the many DRC interests of Belgian billionaire tycoon Philippe de Moerloose. A member of the Kinshasa elite, de Moerloose supplies jets and other presidential toys to DRC President Kabila. In 2006, President Joseph Kabila’s campaign helicopter was at the centre of a legal battle involving Philippe de Moerloose.25 De Moerloose’s companies operated in Mobutu’s Zaire from at least 1991, backing state terrorism and Western corporate plunder that was rendered invisible by the Western media. De Moerloose is also an adviser to European Union (EU) Commissioner—and diamantaire—Louis Michel.
Dan Gertler and Philippe de Moerloose were, reportedly, the only two white men who attended the wedding of Joseph Kabila and the two clearly share interests in “security” provided by OSS at MIBA and elsewhere in Congo. The April 2003 secret agreement signed between the Gertler/Steinmetz company Emaxon Finance and the Kabila government involved MIBA and two de Moerloose companies, OSS-Congo and Demimpex, and other firms.
Overseas Security Services (OSS) operations are apparently grounded in the experience of top expatriate security operatives formerly involved with the biggest security firm in Mobutu’s Zaire.26 According to OSS public relations materials, “these persons have a not unimportant experience in the safety of this country.”26 Providing mine security, body-guard and protection services, OSS operates in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Dubai, South Africa, Republic of Congo (Brazzavile) and Belgium, placing them in cahoots with all sides warring and plundering eastern Congo today.27
Emaxon Finance International is a real gem, one of these octopuses of mining tangled up with interlocking companies and subsidiaries based in specious geographical offshore “tax havens” that work to shield from prosecution people who are responsible for money laundering, weapons and drugs operations, assassinations and other terrorism.
NIKANOR is registered as an Isle of Man (UK) company, an offshore tax haven that helps to conceal criminal activities and maximize profits. NIKANOR directors include Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel (2001-2005) and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research under Madeleine Albright. NIKANOR partners include Mende and Moshe Gertner [sic], Israeli property tycoons with vast holdings in London who control 22 percent of NIKANOR. Another partner is Israeli-born Nir Livnat, managing director of Johannesburg-based Ascot Diamonds, a member of the Steinmetz Group of Diamond Companies, and a principal involved in numerous U.S.-based businesses from Miami to New York.28
THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS
Back in 2001, when the Gertler enterprises surfaced in dirty diamond deals, public relations was handled by Lior Chorev, the “Special Strategic and Communications Consultant” to International Diamond Industries (IDI), and Chorev continued in this role to support Dan Gertler businesses.29 Today, Lior Chorev is partnered with the brothers Yuval and Eyal Arad as director-owners of the Israeli marketing and public relations firm, ARAD Communications.30
“We do work for Mr. Gertler on some of his business issues,” said Lior Chorev.31 ARAD’s many clients include Dan Gertler companies, Los Angeles-based Coral Diamonds and an Israeli aeronautics weaponry manufacturer producing Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs)—robotic weapons and intelligence platforms like those being used against the people of Congo today.32 As a political strategist, Lior Chorev has worked for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.33 He has also participated in Israel-NATO defense planning conferences.34
Dan Gertler is close to Israeli politicians, especially Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and he is very close to diamantaire Beny Steinmetz, a good friend of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Gertler’s inseperable friend, Chaim Leibovitz, is also very close to Lieberman, and was “a regular fixture” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offices.35
Beny Steinmetz is considered to be one of the richest billionaires in Israel. The Steinmetz Group, controlled with his brother Daniel, is one of the biggest clients of the de Beers diamond syndicate. Steinmetz is also involved in an Israeli real estate group that purchased the assets of the British Haslemere real estate company for $1.46 billion. Steinmetz’s real estate partners include the billionaire Israeli investors David and Simon Reuben, and the Saudi Arabian Olayan Group, an investment company that is deeply connected with Bechtel Corporation.36 The Steinmetz web site map of operations hides their involvement in war-torn Congo.37
Seems Dan Gertler’s land grabs and exclusion in Congo have a lot in common with the current crimes against humanity being committed by Israel through its illegal partition in the Middle East. On January 3, 2008, the Jerusalem Post reported that Lior Chorev was an integral part of past Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s advisers, and he was recently quoted to say that even though Sharon did not get to finalize Israel’s final borders (he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006), the route of the security fence—which he decided—would ultimately serve as the basis for the border and as Sharon’s lasting legacy.38
“He felt he needed to set the border because he didn’t trust the younger generations,” Chorev was quoted to say. “He knew the fence route by heart and the reason for every stretch of land being on one side or the other.”38
In 2003, the U.N. Panel of Experts on war in Congo revealed that Emaxon Finance International is controlled by Israeli diamond traders Chaim Leibovitz and Dan Gertler.39 Emaxon lists as its address an office in Montreal, Canada, but Emaxon’s majority shareholder is listed as FTS Worldwide, a nebulous global corporation whose business address is that of a firm of lawyers, Mossack Fonseca & Company, in Panama City. FTS Worldwide is registered with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to lawyer Andre Zolty of Geneva Switzerland. A copy of the MIBA-Emaxon contract was signed on 13 April 2003 by Israeli-Americans Yaakov Neeman and Chaim Leibovitz.40
Yaakov Neeman is a founding partner of Herzog, Fox and Neeman, Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s top law firms, and he has held Israeli government cabinet and ministerial positions.41 Neeman is on the Advisory Board of Markstone Capital Group, a very influential group of investment bankers, with Eli Hurvitz. On the board of Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries with Eli Hurvitz is Northrup-Grumman director Philip Frost.42 Both Philip Frost and Maurice Templesman are top-level councilors for the American Stock Exchange. Eli Hurvitz sat on the International Advisory Counsel of Harvard University’s Belfer Center, 2002-2005, during the period when the Belfer Center and their intelligence operative Robert Rotberg formalized the “Kimberley Process” to officially whitewash blood diamonds.43 Yakov Neeman is also a governor of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel.
One of the main objectives of the Kimberley Process, and the Harvard Belfer Center’s role, was to protect the South African Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartels and their leading buyers and agents like Maurice Templesman and Beny Steinmetz.44 Added to those diamond industry firms whitewashed by the Kimberley Process are all the Zionist diamond dealers and cartels that have risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust.
The Israeli-American enterprises of the Gertler/Steinmetz gang have proliferated and today are major shareholders or owners of diamond concessions in Congo’s Kasai province and copperbelt concessions in Katanga. The copperbelt is the big money in Congo. Copper prices recently hit an all time high due to monopoly control by corporations and new applications in transportation, aerospace and weaponry. Cobalt is used in dye and paint processes for manufacturing. More importantly, it is elemental to superalloys used for tank armor, spacecraft, turbines, ship hulls, ship hulls, blast furnaces, refineries, petroleum drilling rigs, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Like coltan, or columbium-tantalite, cobalt is also used in cell phone batteries. The Katanga copperbelt is also rich in germanium, a rare metal used in optical fibers, infrared lenses and telecommunication satellites.45
The entire military-industrial-prisons complex revolves around minerals like cobalt, niobium and heterogenite (cobalt oxide), yet the truth about what happens to African people in lands taken over by these mining companies is hidden by the corporate media. More and more land is being stolen, more and more atrocities committed, with less and less transparency, and less and less accountability, and fewer and fewer voices for the voiceless. And, as usual, there are always a lot of empty promises.
THOUGH SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS
Over the past fifty years, elite Israeli nationals have perpetrated conflict and injustice in Africa, fueled by and for minerals. Operatives associated with the Israeli military or intelligence services—the Mossad—maintain strategic criminal syndicates in competition and in partnership with other syndicates involving men like Philippe De Moerloose, Louis Michel, Viscount Etienne Davignon, John Bredenkamp and Tony Buckingham.
Israeli trained shock troops became Mobutu’s bodyguards, with Mossad advisers. According to a report by the American Jewish Committee: after 1980 “Mossad agents, military emissaries, and a small group of private businessmen… replaced diplomats as Israel’s main interlocutors with African leaders and political (mainly opposition) groups.” The report cites rising involvement of private defense and security interests, especially in Angola, DRC and Central Africa Republic, since 1992.46
Israeli operatives and “businessmen” appear everywhere there is egregious suffering and dispossession. Dan Gertler’s forays into the bloody world of diamonds involve Israeli arms dealers Yair Klein, who is reportedly wanted by the U.S. for training Medellin drug-cartel militias in Colombia, and Dov Katz.47 Klein was convicted by Israel (1991) for his involvement with groups that targeted and assassinated Colombian politicians, journalists, and police. Jailed in Sierra Leone in 1999, Klein was a field representative for Gertler in war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia. Gertler also mingles with the Russian Military Brotherhood, a group of “retired Russian generals whom Gertler describes as good friends.”48,49
Retired Israeli Defense Forces Colonel Yair Klein reportedly organized arms for diamonds networks in Sierra Leone and Liberia after President Charles Taylor was deposed. In 1999, Klein was arrested in Sierra Leone on charges of smuggling arms to the rebel Revolutionary United Front.50 The U.N. also documented collaborations between Sierra Leone’ rebels and Lazare Kaplan agent Damian Gagnon; Lazare Kaplan International is one of the organized crime syndicates of Jewish American Maurice Templesman.51
The Steinmetz Group of companies are also involved in the bloody diamond fields of Sierra Leone, along with Energem (formerly DiamondWorks), the company described above that is connected to the white mercenaries depicted in Hollywood’s Blood Diamond propaganda film.52 In December 2007, local people in Sierra Leone struggling to gain the smallest livelihood from their own resources were shot by police during peaceful protests against the Steinmetz-controlled Koidu Holdings site. It’s the same old local people’s story happening everywhere. These were people from communities driven off their own land by mining companies that promised the world, cajoled the trusting people, and gave nothing after. The Steinmetz gang called in the local paramilitary, a curfew was imposed and people were shot; the police, as usual, falsely claimed that protesters were armed.53
Like most mining mafias in Africa, the Israeli octopus—organized crime syndicates, offshore subsidiaries, interlocking directorships and affiliated mercenaries—has gripped the very heart of Congo like an octopus grips and stuns its prey. Mining regulates the pulse of Congo, and foreign mining companies with their black sell-out agents are sucking the blood out of the people and the wealth out of the land.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
Beyond the intriguing Jewish rivalry for diamonds in the heart of darkness, this tale takes a chilling turn with the involvement of certain German firms and New York City lawyers. NIKANOR, another Gertler/Steinmetz company of dubious origins operating in DRC, has a subcontract with the notorious ThyssenKrupp conglomerate, a company comprised of two former Nazi weapons manufacturers linked to the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Lehman Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan, DuPont and IBM, in the great Nazi-American money plot.54
These companies were all behind the Jewish Holocaust. The infamous German Krupp firm is the industrial corporation that collaborated with former CIA director Allen Dulles and former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Clients of the Dulles brothers’ law firm Sullivan and Cromwell included Adolph Hitler.54 Ted Terry, one of the senior counselors of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell today, is also a director of a philanthropy called the Harold K. Hochschild (HKH) Foundation, named for the mining magnate behind AMAX, a company operating in the copperbelt in Zambia, but whose parent company, Phelps Dodge, operates in Katanga, Congo. Harold K. Hochschild was close to the CIA, and he appears to have backed the Katanga succession in the 1960’s just as Dan Gertler in recent years backed the reorganization of power in Congo by force. Sullivan and Cromwell was also the law firm for AMAX. 55,56
Brown Brothers Harriman & Company (BBH) was the primary Wall Street connection for German companies and the U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, an early financial backer of the Nazi party. BBH bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, steel, fuel, coal, and U.S. treasury bonds to Germany. These were used to build Hitler’s war machine, and the ties proliferated even after the Nazi concentration camps began churning out skeletons. The horrors of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buckenwald became public knowledge long before they became public outrage. It is the same story for Congo.
A PRAYER FOR THE DEAD
There are no records or statistics of the numbers of people brutalized or killed in the diamond or cobalt mining areas, like Kolwezi, Mbuji Mayi, Tshikapa, Banalia, or Kananga in DRC, or Ndola in Zambia, and many of the victims of security abuses will never be known.
When Gertler and Steinmetz and their buddies came to Congo it was soon clear that they had to challenge Zimbabwean tycoons John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach—two cronies of dictator Robert Mugabe involved in pillaging Congo and Zimbabwe for decades. The United Nations Panel of Experts on DRC named both men for plundering copper and cobalt from Katanga, and both deal globally in weapons. Bredenkamp is one of the fifty richest men in England and he reportedly owns a mansion several doors down from Margaret Thatcher’s residence in London.
On November 7, 2007 it was reported that Dan Gertler was instrumental in putting together a deal in which Katanga Mining Ltd. would buy rival NIKANOR for $2.1 billion and merge their adjacent mine projects in Congo to form the world’s largest cobalt company. Also announced was a joint venture between the Central African Mining & Exploration Company (CAMEC) and another Gertler-controlled firm called Prairie International Limited.
The CAMEC/Prairie joint venture will exploit DRC’s Luita copper processing facility, develop the Mukondo Mountain cobalt mine—called the world’s richest cobalt mine—and work on “other” exploration properties. Prairie is majority owned by the family of Dan Gertler. CAMEC is connected to Zimbabwean/South African/British tycoon Billy Rautenbach.57 The DRC government effectively banned controversial Zimbabwean businessman Billy Rautenbach from the country by declaring him persona non grata in July 2007, but this doesn’t seem to stop him from getting what he wants. Rautenbach is also wanted in South Africa on 300 charges of fraud, corruption and theft.
Rautenbach is a former motor car rally driver who controls a business empire in Southern and Central Africa through a British Virgin Islands company called Ridgepoint Overseas Development Limited. In 1998, the short-lived President of Congo, Laurent Kabila, named Rautenbach the managing director of La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines), one of Africa’s biggest cobalt mines, the Katanga properties of the Union Miniere de Haut Katanga formerly developed by the Belgian colonial government. Rautenbach today is one of the Africa’s largest exporters of heterogenite (cobalt ore) from the DRC through his Congo Cobalt Company (CoCoCo), but he also has shares in two other lucrative DRC mining firms—Boss and Mukondo—which reportedly earn over US$100 million a month.58
While there has been a lot of Western media fanfare over the Kabila governments’ supposed “independent” review of mining contracts, little substantive change can be expected.59 Structural factors exploit the Congolese people and lands and benefit white businessmen, arms dealers, bankers, and their embraceable black agents. Big business benefits from perception management articles well-placed in media to give the impression that the international system is just, that there are watchdogs, checks and balances.
However, while the DRC and the World Bank present a propaganda front about their ostensible attention to mining reform and the new mining code, NIKANOR—Mining Journal reports—“is in the advantageous position of having entered into a post mining-code contract, ‘which makes us [NIKANOR] relatively comfortable’”60 In other words, the mining review is a sham, it may force some changes, but it will be cosmetic at best.
Dan Gertler and the Steinmetz Group’s partner Jewish-American Nir Livnat is also a director of Anglovaal Mining with Rick and Brian Menell and Basil Hersov of the South African Menell and Hersov dynasties.61 Hersov has been named as a beneficiary of fraud and racketeering involving British BAE Systems weapons deals with shady offshore companies.62
The octopus of South African connections is a story in itself, with links to top officials from Britain to Canada, like Canadian Senator J. Trevor Eyton, and offshore mining companies involved in all the big money (diamonds, gold, petroleum, cobalt) and big corporations with interlocking directorships: Coca Cola, Nestlé, General Motors, and the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation. Barrick, of course, is partnered up with the Oppenheimer/De Beers firm Anglo-American Corporation at six sites in Africa, including Congo.
Rick Menell is a director of Bateman Engineering—owned by Benny Steinmetz—the junior partner of the NIKANOR projects in Katanga. Britain’s Earl of Balfour is a director of both Bateman and NIKANOR. Menell is also the director of Teal Exploration and Mining, whose directors include Joaquim Chissano, former President of Mozambique; Murray Hitzman, a Clinton administration official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994-1996); Hannes Meyer, who worked with Anglo-Gold Ashanti in Congo, 1999-2006, when militias in Ituri were funded to get the gold out. Teal Exploration also has ties to Anvil Mining and Anglo-American Corporation.63
Brian Menell, Nir Livnat’s associate on the board of Anglovaal, is on the board of Energem (formerly DiamondWorks) with Tony and Mario Teixeira. The Livnat connection ties Teixeira into networks that have supported both Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba in Congo’s bloody wars. Energem is also involved in the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline, along with Nexant, a subsidiary of the deep intelligence and defense insider Bechtel Corporation.64
Brian Menell is also on the board of First Africa Oil, which operates in seven African countries, and First Africa Oil director John Bentley is a director of Osprey Oil and Gas, whose directors include Carol Bell, a director of the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Bentley is also on the board of Adastra Minerals—formerly America Mineral Fields (AMF, AMFI, AMX), a company based in 1995 in Hope, Arkansas—and set up by Robert Friedland and Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle, notable “friends of Bill” Clinton. Since 1995, American Mineral Fields has been involved in Brazil, Russia, Norway, Zambia, Angola and the DRC. A criminal backer of the war in DRC, Jean-Raymond Boulle, who holds 36.4 % of the company stock, was the former General Director of De Beers in Zaire, part of the Templesman alliance of terrorism under the Mobutu regime.65,66
The Gertler/Steinmetz interests apparently curry huge favors with Congo’s number two most powerful man, Augustine Katumba Mwanke, one of Joseph Kabila’s closest allies and financiers, former Governor of Katanga (1998-2001) and director of Australia’s Anvil Mining. The UN Panel of Experts (2002) cited Mwanke for illegal arms deals and plunder of Congo: Mwanke negotiated arms purchases through Belgian banks and the DRC mining company MIBA.67 Reportedly, Mwanke personally clears $US 1,000,000 a day through his interests in Katanga mining deals.68
Anvil Mining has been involved in massacres in DRC.69 Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth L. Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels, Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1987-1989) under George Schultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central African Affairs (1980-1981). The former top internal intelligence and security chief of the United Nations Observer’s Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.70
THOU SHALT NOT RAPE AND PLUNDER
Gertler/Steinmetz interests have also been jostling for copper and cobalt concessions with Kinross-Forrest Group. Gertler has bought up or invested heavily in companies just to close them down. George Forrest also made the UN hit list of Congo’s looters and Forrest and his three sons helped bankroll Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election “victory”.71 George Forrest’s daughter is reportedly married to the son of Louis Michel. Malta and George Forrest are controlling directors in Katanga Mining Limited.
Born as Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest, the Belgian Forrest interests have been pillars of exploitation in Congo since at least 1922, when they launched mining operations in Katanga. Forrest’s Katanga Mining directors include: three Canadians; Congo’s Jean-Claude Masangu Mulongo, a former Governor of DRC and high official at the IMF and World Bank; and the current Governor of the Central Bank of DRC. The Forrest dynasty has munitions factories in Belgium and Kenya, and has partnered with OM-Group, in Ohio [USA], dealing in Congo’s cobalt and coltan. Forrest International also operates in Europe, Burundi—involving him on both sides of Congo’s bloody war—and the Middle East.72 Forrest interests in DRC include aviation, foods, plantations, construction, logging, copper and cobalt mining. Forrest companies are enmeshed in the coltan plunder in eastern Congo.
Katanga is the world’s richest mining metropolis, part of the vast copper belt that stretches across northern Zambia and southern Congo—and the home to unprecedented human misery due to state orchestrated repression and communities overrun with toxic mining, tuberculosis, cancers, immune disorders, racial discrimination and slavery. The Zambian copperbelt concessions over the border involve many of the same companies and interests mentioned above, and others.73
Workers and communities in and around these mines suffer all the standard treatable maladies (typhoid, malaria, tetanus, polio, malnutrition) as well. However, such stories are off the agenda for the North American, European, Japanese, Australian and Israeli media corporations providing the mainstay of English language indoctrination meant to instill racial superiority and a vast ignorance and obliviousness that leaves westerns populations shaking their heads and wringing their hands and clicking their tongues, while all the while wondering “what is to be done?” It does not cross people’s minds that their own hands are dirty, that their own consciousness has been falsified, as all the raw materials from Congo enrich the lives of people in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel.
The immediate capital investment required for just one Gertler project in Katanga—the Komoto Oliveira Virgule (KOV) project—is reportedly $US 1.8 billion dollars, income to kick start billions of dollars of unused equipment mothballed in the middle Mobutu era. There are rumors that Bechtel is involved, but the KOV project involves ThyssenKrupp AG as a minor player.74
The Krupp firm is one of several German firms involved in the plunder in eastern Congo, exploitation which involves the DeutscheGesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—GTZ—a “German technological cooperation agency” whose Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries.75 Krupp industries use coltan and cobalt for superalloys.76 Dr.-Ing. Ekkehard D. Schultz, a ThyssenKrupp director, is also a director of Bayer AG, the Germany firm whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was named for its involvement in the ongoing illegal plunder of coltan and cassiterite (tin) in eastern Congo. NIKANOR director Jay Pomrenze is also a consultant for the Deutsche Bank.77 Certain German and U.S. firms benefit from the military occupation of Rwandan-backed warlord Laurent Nkunda in North Kivu, DRC, where Nkunda controls the Lueshe niobium mine “owned” by Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH, a subsidiary of New York-based Mettalurg Group.78,79
HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER
Dan Gertler’s grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond;” in youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an “untra-nationationalist Jewish militia,” but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8 Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950’s in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the country’s second-largest industry, but Israel’s top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80
The diamond jewelry trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99%—everything that is not synthetic or artificial diamonds—involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the world’s rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial district on Ahad Ha’am Street.81 Dan Gertler’s father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that spends more money promoting the false image of “conflict-free” diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry.48
On August 16, 2007, Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: “What does the Torah say about men exploiting other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits are being made?”
There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed, and that—an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people—is how religion falsifies spirituality.
1. In January 2008 the International Rescue Committee, who is also discussed in this article, released its second survey of mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo, estimating that 5,400,000 people have died, or some 1500 people every day. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: an Ongoing Crisis, International Rescue Committee, January 2008. However, IRC statistics are highly biased and politicized. See: keith harmon snow, “Over Five Million Dead in Congo?” Dissident Voice, February 4, 2008. [?]
2. Personal interview, Democratic Republic of Congo, August 2006. [?]
3. keith harmon snow, “Warlord’s Deadly Battle, Toward Freedom, 2007. [?]
4. Officers: Antonio Teixeira, President & CEO; Robert G. Rainey, CFO; Brett Thompson, COO, Mining; Dimitri (Jimmy) Kanakakis, Vice President, Corporate & Legal Affairs; Bernard Poznanski, Corporate Secretary; Board Members: Brian Menell, Richard Dorfman, Bruce Holmes, Robert Rainey, Antonio Teixeira. [?]
5. See: “Africa/Diamonds: Rough diamonds,” Africa Confidential, 5 March 2004, Vol. 45, No. 5; and “Equatorial Guinea: All Theft is Property,” Africa Confidential, 17 Nov. 2006, Vol. 47, No. 23: p. 12. [?]
6. Tim Hoare, the head of the advisers that launched it, Canaccord Adams, sits alongside rock star and champion of Africa Bob Geldof on the board of the television-production company Ten Alps. See: Ben Laurance, “Energy firm link to blood diamonds,” The Sunday Times, December 30, 2007. [?]
7. See: keith harmon snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007. [?]
8. Yossi Melman and Asaf Carmel, “Diamond in the rough,” Haaretz, March 24, 2005. [?] [?] [?]
9. See: keith harmon snow, “Congo’s President Joseph Kabila: Dynasty or Travesty?” Toward Freedom, November 13, 2007. [?]
10. Private interview, Kinshasa, August 2006. [?]
11. See: “Terror in the Diamond Fields: Excessive Force and Impunity in the DRC,” Amnesty International Canada; Democratic Republic of Congo: Government should investigate human rights violations in the Mbuji Mayi diamond fields, Amnesty International, October 22, 2002. [?]
12. Making a Killing: The Diamond Trade in Government Controlled DRC, Amnesty International, 2002, AFR 62/017/2002 22/10/2002. [?]
13. See: “ICEM protests Congo’s Transport, Diamond Injustices,” International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Worker’s Union, May 7, 2007. [?]
14. “Diamond miners killed in DR Congo,” BBC News, 7 August 2006. [?]
15. See: Jewish Africa and Chabad. [?]
16. Private communication, Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, August 16, 2007. [?]
17. “Lag Baomer in Kinshasa,” June 2005. [?]
18. “Visite de l’Ambassadeur Revah a’ Kinshasa,” Kadima 010, June-September 2007. [?]
19. See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 9, 2007. [?]
20. Nicole Gaouette, “Inside Israel’s diamond trade: a family affair,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 February 2002. [?]
21. Yitzhak Danon, “Top Israelis accused of illegal diamond deals: Israel: Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal,” Globes (Israel), 18 February 2004. See also: “Column One: What Lieberman Wants,” Jerusalem Post, October 20, 2006. [?] [?]
22. Christian Dietrich, “Blood Diamonds: Effective African-Based Monopolies,” African Security Review, Vol. 10, No 3., 2001. [?]
23. Yitzhak Danon, “Top Israelis accused of illegal diamond deals: Israel: Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal,” Globes (Israel), 18 February 2004. [?]
24. See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 9, 2007. The Angolan military protected Kinshasa during the so-called “rebellion” involving Rwanda and Uganda. The Angolans do not like the Rwandans or Ugandans due to their military and commercial relations with Angolan rebels, the União Nacionalpara a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), and because Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers invaded Angola after their failed bid to control the Congo’s strategic Inga Dam power station and Matadi port between 1998 and 2001. Angola sent troops to Congo in July and August 2006, and there were black Angolan troops amongst the European Union mercenary forces—EUFOR—sent to quell any possible rebellions during the “historic national elections.” Angola also sent troops to Congo to back Kabila during the warlord’s deadly battle of March 2007. [?]
25. “Presidential Chopper,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47 Number 23, November 17, 2006. [?]
26. See: Overseas Security Services Congo sprl web site. [?] [?]
27. OSS-Congo owner Philippe de Moerloose communicated with this author after his name appeared in a prior story mentioning OSS-Congo and offered to meet in Europe and provide the author with the “correct” information about his companies operations in Congo. Repeated communications with De Moerloose seeking clarifications and information for this story were not answered. [?]
28. See e.g., SEC info on Lenorth Holdings and SDG Marketing. [?]
29. Lior Chorev, The First [DRC] Diamond Polishing Plant to Move into Full Production, Press Release, DGI Group of Companies, January 11, 2005. [?]
30. ARAD Communications web site. [?]
31. Private communication, Lior Chorev, January 19, 2008. [?]
32. See: keith harmon snow, “Over Five Million Dead in Congo?” Dissident Voice, February 4, 2008. [?]
33. Private email communication, Lior Chorev, January 19, 2008. See also: Gil Hoffman, “Olmert, Netanyahu Rivalry Gets Personal,” Israel.jpost.com, March 26, 2006; “Sharon allies and foes joust over new party as March 28 elections are set,” Associated Press, November 22, 2005. [?]
34. NATO Transformation, the Mediterranean Dialog, and NATO-Israel Relations, October 23, 2006. [?]
35. Yossi Melman and Asaf Carmel, “Diamond in the Rough,” Haaretz, March 24, 2005. [?]
36. The Olayan Group web site. [?]
37. The Steinmetz Group. [?]
38. Gil Hoffman, “Politics; Unconscious Legacy,” Jerusalem Post, features.jpost.com, January 3, 2008. [?] [?]
39. United Nations Panel of Experts Confidential Report. [?]
40. Under the contract Emaxon granted Miba loans totaling $5-million in 2003, and a further $10-million subsequently. In exchange, Emaxon gained rights to 88% of Miba’s production at a discount, formally, of 5%. [?]
41. Herzog, Fox and Neeman web site. [?]
42. Tevapharm. [?]
43. See: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. [?]
44. On Neeman and Hurvitz, see Markstone Capital Group; on Robert Rotberg, Maurice Templesman and the Harvard Belfer Center, see: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. [?]
45. Criminal rackets known to the United Nations security were or some time illegally shipping uranium and cobalt out of Katanga by road to Zimbabwe and Tanzania (private interview, U.N. Official, 2006). [?]
46. Israel and Africa: Assessing the Past, Envisioning the Future, The Africa Institute American Jewish Committee and The Harold Hartog School Tel Aviv University, May 2006. [?]
47. Ron Ben-Yishai and Molly Camprier-Kritz, “The Murder Request Went to the Wrong Address,” Yediot Aharonot weekend supplement on 19 September 1999. [?]
48. Nicole Gaouette, “Inside Israel’s diamond trade: a family affair,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 February 2002. [?] [?]
49. For a discussion of the veracity of these facts and more on the “Russian Military Brotherhood” see: Central Africa Minerals and Arms Research Bulletin, Edition 2, International Peace Information Service, June 18, 2001. [?]
50. Jimmy Johnson, “Israelis and Hezbollah Haven’t Always Been Enemies,” Appearing in Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA, 6 September 2006. [?]
51. Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, December 2000. [?]
52. Energem web site; and also: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. [?]
53. Mineweb. [?]
54. Charles Higham, Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949, Delacorte Press, 1983. [?] [?]
55. Susan Mazur, “Deeper Into the Dillon-Euphronios Nexus with David N. Gibbs,” SCOOP, April 26, 2006. [?]
56. David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crises, University of Chicago Press, 1991. [?]
57. Eric Onstad, “UPDATE 2-CAMEC shares soar after agrees Congo joint venture,” Reuters, Nov. 7, 2007. [?]
58. Brenna Chigonga, “Zimbabwe: Meet Country’s Richest People,” The Herald, July 14, 2007. [?]
59. See: Maurice Carney, “Congo’s Contract Review,” Pambazuka News, January 17, 2008. [?]
60. Martin Creamer, “Funded NIKANOR presses on with $1,8bn copper mine, refinery,” Mining Weekly, September 21, 2007. [?]
61. Julie Walker, “Hersovs and Menells are in no hurry to yield control of Anglovaal,” Sunday Times. [?]
62. Evelyn Groenink, “Arms deal: Who got R1bn in pay-offs?” Mail & Guardian, January 12, 2007. [?]
63. Teal Exploration & Mining web site. [?]
64. Press Release: Kenya-Uganda Oil Products Pipeline, Kenya-Uganda Joint Co-coordinating Commission for Extension of Oil Pipeline, August 17, 2005; see also: Energem web site. [?]
65. François Misser and Olivier Vallée, “Des matières premières toujours convoitées. Les nouveaux acteurs du secteur minier Africain,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1998, p.24-25; also Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999. [?]
66. Diamond Fields International Management. [?]
67. ‘Inculpations à la Belgolaise’, Le Libre Belgique, 4 June 2004. [?]
68. Private interview, Kinshasa, DRC, April 2007. [?]
69. Norm Dixon, “Congo Massacre: Australian mining company’s managers indicted,” Green Left Review, November 4, 2006. [?]
70. His name is known, but he threatened to track down and break the author’s legs if he is revealed. [?]
71. See: Barry Sergeant, “NIKANOR’s Quandry: Meet Dan the Man, King of the Congo,” MoneyWeb, 4 April 2007; “Congo Kinshasa: After the Election” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47, No. 23, 17 Nov. 2006; and United Nations Security Council Report to the Secretary General, S/2003/1027, 23 October 2003. [?]
72. George Forrest International. [?]
73. Personal investigation, Ndola, Zambia copperbelt mines, 2000. [?]
74. Nikanor. [?]
75. These are: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); Federal Foreign Office; Federal Ministry of Finance; and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor. Since 1998 the Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from the BMZ. [?]
76. Karen Hayes and Richard Burge, Coltan Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo: How tantalum-using industries can commit to the reconstruction of the DRC, Fauna & Flora Int’l, 2003. [?]
77. NIKANOR web site. [?]
78. Metallurg Group. [?]
79. See keith harmon snow, “Three Cheers for Eve Ensler? Propaganda, White Collar Crime, and Sexual Violence in Eastern Congo,” Z Magazine on-line (Z-Net), October 24, 2007. [?]
80. “Moshe Schnitzer: Un Legende s’en est Allee,” Kadima 010, June-September 2007. [?]
81. “The Israel Diamond Exchange — Kiryat Moshe Schnitzer”, Diamond Key, 2002. [?]
Labels: DAN GERTLER, DIAMONDS, DRC, GEORGE FORREST, JENDAYI FRASER, KRUPP, MINING, NEOCOLONIALISM
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