For 400 hot and dusty kilometers, a two-lane highway cuts through central Africa, its path lined with the carcasses of trucks, buses and minivans, but this modest road holds outsize value for global markets, connecting some of the continent’s richest mines to the rest of the world and, most notably, China.
Along the route, thousands of flatbed trucks haul sheets of copper and sacks of cobalt hydroxide, essential for electric vehicles and other 21st-century technologies. Their drivers must pay steep tolls — as much as US$900 for a round trip.
For almost a decade, a cut of those tolls flowed to the family of one politician: former Congolese president Joseph Kabila, records showed.
The toll payments illustrate how Kabila blurred the lines between state and private business, documents reviewed by Bloomberg News showed.
By striking such deals with his regime, Chinese companies over the past 15 years came to dominate the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DR Congo) mining industry, down to the roads the country’s minerals travel along for export.
The relationship with Kabila has been of strategic benefit to China in its economic rivalry with the US. It has also helped the DR Congo, a nation of 105 million, become Africa’s largest producer of copper and the world’s biggest source of cobalt.
Yet, as on much of the continent, a foreign power and the country’s elite, not its general population, have reaped the benefits of its natural resources.
The trail begins with the company Kabila’s government contracted to rebuild and maintain the highway: state-controlled China Railway Group.
Someone needed to collect the tolls that would pay for the roadwork, and there the former president’s family saw an opportunity to cash in.
Two management companies, one of which was cofounded by a Kabila family investment firm, have misappropriated US$238 million since 2015, allege a pair of audits by the DR Congo’s top anti-corruption official that were seen by Bloomberg.
China Railway did not respond to e-mails or telephone calls seeking comment. Nor did Kabila or his family.
The Kabilas’ involvement in the toll road came to light through the biggest leak ever of financial documents from Africa. A consortium of five non-governmental organizations and 19 media outlets, including Bloomberg, gained access to bank records obtained by the Paris-based Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa and the French news organization Mediapart.
The resulting articles and reports — published under the name “Congo Hold-Up” — demonstrated the extent to which the country’s most powerful family used the DR Congo unit of Gabon-based Groupe BGFIBank to serve its private interests during a period in which at least US$138 million in state funds passed through the lender to Kabila’s family and associates.
They also show how Chinese companies transferred tens of millions of dollars to the same network.
In December last year, Kabila’s lawyers denied wrongdoing.
The investigation found that at the center of many of the toll-road transactions, is a 59-year-old Chinese businessman, Cong Maohuai, who arrived in the DR Congo one-quarter of a century ago and built an array of companies with a hand in the country’s most lucrative industries: infrastructure and the mining of gold, cobalt, copper, tin and lithium.
Cong also owns the five-star Fleuve Congo Hotel in Kinshasa. Twenty-two stories tall, the glassy building overlooks the compounds of foreign embassies and the homes of many of the country’s richest people, including Kabila.
Cong, who works out of an office on the hotel grounds, served as president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the DR Congo’s copper and cobalt region from 2008 until 2015, when he became president of the Congo Overseas Chinese Association.
He has denied any impropriety and said he is not a middleman for either Kabila or the Chinese government.
The businessman controls the companies that collect tolls on the mineral highway, one of which he said he acquired from the Kabila family investment firm. Some of this revenue flowed to a company that was used to direct funds to the former president’s relatives and entourage, bank records showed.
Although sometimes described in the media as an adviser to the former president, Cong has denied any connection to Kabila, beyond occasional meetings at public events.
Increased scrutiny of the DR Congo’s mining industry comes after a pivotal moment. Kabila, a former military commander who trained in China, assumed power from his father, who was assassinated in 2001.
In 2019, Felix Tshisekedi succeeded him as president after the two men made a deal to resolve a disputed election in which another candidate almost certainly won the vote.
Tshisekedi, the son of a well-known opposition politician, initially governed the DR Congo in coalition with Kabila, but he has since sidelined or co-opted those loyal to his predecessor.
His administration is now revisiting contracts with Chinese and other foreign companies negotiated under Kabila that it views as skewed against the Congolese.
In the early 2000s, as the DR Congo emerged from years of civil war, China seized an opportunity to buy mines, a process that has accelerated in the past few years.
In 2008, the countries agreed that Chinese firms would finance US$3 billion worth of infrastructure and build a US$3.2 billion copper and cobalt project known as Sicomines, whose tax-free profits would repay the investments.
China Railway teamed up with state-owned Power Construction Corp of China, also known as PowerChina. Both companies are major players in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) Belt and Road Initiative.
PowerChina did not respond to requests for comment.
That same year, the DR Congo separately awarded a subsidiary of China Railway the first of three no-bid contracts to rebuild its main export and import routes, including the key mining highway, which runs from Kolwezi to the Zambian border. Tolls would pay for the roadwork.
The highways were in desperate need of an upgrade, and China Railway was on the ground and ready. The roads led to riches. Copper and cobalt exports increased more than 50-fold under Kabila, with about 1.2 million tonnes of metal trucked out of the DR Congo in 2018, his final year in power.
Much of the highway goes by the grand name of National Road 1. In a country with one of the world’s worst road networks, it stands out for a simple reason: It is paved.
The road runs past dozens of communities that have mostly missed out on the rewards of the DR Congo’s multibillion-dollar mining industry. Makeshift shacks with orange tarpaulin roofs signal the homes of Congolese leading migratory lives on the economic fringes of one of the world’s poorest countries.
Judith Kasongo works as a cook and cleaner in Kanyaka, a village along the toll road. She has no clean water to wash her food.
“It’s beyond understanding, and as a Congolese it hurts to see all this wealth go outside the country, as we remain in poverty,” 31-year-old Kasongo said. “We see our minerals developing other countries, while in Congo we don’t have enough roads and face so many difficulties.”
Congolese Inspector General of Finance Jules Alingete has been described by one Congolese magazine as “the sheriff of finance and the public good.” He has become an anti-corruption crusader, launching investigations into politicians and businessmen who were untouchable under Kabila.
He said he faces constant threats from his targets.
As part of his investigations, Alingete has dug into who really profited from the DR Congo’s most important roads. They were supposed to benefit the country as a whole. There were to be at least US$1.1 billion worth of new and refurbished toll roads: two connected segments in the Katanga region and another from Kinshasa to the country’s main port of Matadi.
Instead, a large portion of the US$757 million in tolls collected on the mining route from 2010 through 2020 vanished, the inspector general’s office said.
On one leg of the highway, in a five-and-a-half-year period starting in 2015, maintenance spending amounted to only US$50 million, less than one-fifth of what was generated in tolls during that time, his auditors found.
The inspector general’s conclusion: Hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost to overbilling and embezzlement.
Alingete identified the culprits: the two toll operators, which were entitled to keep only 10 percent of the fees collected.
One, a company called Societe de Gestion Routiere du Congo (SGR) misappropriated US$121 million from April 2015 through 2020, an audit report seen by the consortium and verified by Alingete showed.
The Kabilas have a long association with SGR, as does Cong. China Railway initially owned SGR in a joint venture with the Kabila family investment firm, which took full control in April 2015, records showed.
Yet, 10 days before that ownership change, Cong had represented the company in renewing its toll concession with the Congolese government.
He said that SGR’s absent legal representative, a senior China Railway manager, had authorized him to sign the contract.
Cong said he acquired SGR in November 2016, although the DR Congo’s corporate registry did not reflect the transfer until this year, after the consortium sent him questions.
In that same five-and-a-half-year period, US$117 million disappeared from the road’s other toll operator, Societe de Gestion de Peage au Congo (SOPECO), Alingete’s auditors found in a separate report.
Cong owns that company, too.
The audits do not cover what happened before 2015, although most of the funds intended for roadwork also “went up in smoke” in the preceding years, the inspector general’s office found.
Like SGR, SOPECO has ties to the Kabilas. From 2013 through January 2016, the two toll operators made 44 payments worth a total of US$10.4 million to a company called Congo Construction Co (CCC), which delivered more than US$30 million to people and entities directly linked to the Kabilas, Bloomberg reported in November last year.
Almost all the money from the toll-road businesses was withdrawn from BGFIBank in cash, documents showed.
“These payments created clear conflicts of interest and serious risks of fraud and bribery,” said a report by the Sentry, a Washington-based anti-corruption group that was part of the “Congo Hold-Up” consortium.
BGFIBank’s Congo unit was itself a Kabila family business: The former president’s brother was its chief executive officer, and his sister owned 40 percent of the bank until 2018, when both were forced out amid accumulating scandals resulting from an earlier data leak by a whistle-blower.
Before her shares were reclaimed by BGFIBank’s Gabonese headquarters, Kabila’s sister drew up an abortive plan to sell her stake to three new shareholders, including Cong, who would have paid US$2.9 million for a 7.5 percent interest, bank records showed.
Cong said he was not aware of such a proposal.
In a statement after publication of the first “Congo Hold-Up” stories, the bank acknowledged past governance problems at its DR Congo branch, but questioned the authenticity of the leaked documents.
The consortium found no indications that CCC did any construction work.
Cong said that two SOPECO transfers to CCC’s account at BGFIBank were for a loan agreement and a gravel supply deal, but he did not know why SGR sent almost US$8 million to the company, because the payments occurred before he took over the business.
Bloomberg could not verify all the figures from the government reports, and Alingete did not respond to multiple requests for the complete audit documents.
In e-mails to the consortium, Cong denied the inspector general’s allegations.
L’Agence Congolaise des Grands Travaux, the government agency that oversees most of the DR Congo’s biggest infrastructure projects, including toll roads, told the consortium that it was not aware that either toll-road company engaged “in any cases of corruption or other improprieties.”
Yet, according to the audit reports, Alingete has urged the government to cancel the contracts held by SOPECO and SGR and replace them with “a much more responsible partner.”
In the waning days of the Kabila administration, Cong won extensions on his concessions to collect tolls on the mineral highway. The bounty would continue into 2025 for one stretch of road and to 2043 on the other, the audits revealed.
The companies also signed contracts for tolls and roadwork on two other mineral supply routes that could amount to US$500 million.
Alingete’s investigation could threaten Cong’s franchise, but for now, his contracts survive, and business has never been better.
The DR Congo’s mining ministry reported last year that copper exports were on track to break all records.
Additional reporting by Lucien Kahozi
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