When China Railway Group and Sinohydro, two major Chinese construction companies, pledged more than a decade ago to help rebuild and expand infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in return for a sizeable chunk of the country’s mineral wealth, they took a giant gamble. The multibillion-dollar effort matched President Joseph Kabila’s soaring political ambitions and the nation’s pressing needs for roads, railways, and hospitals, yet its success was far from assured.
The largest-ever leak of African financial records and data, obtained by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and Mediapart and shared with The Sentry by PPLAAF and the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network, now shows that the Chinese state-owned enterprises had a few aces in the hole all along: a shell company, a slick intermediary with a network of companies, and BGFIBank DRC.1 The trove of documents and data, called the Congo Hold-up leak, reveals that the state enterprises used a middleman with accounts at the bank run by the president’s brother to pump tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of the Kabilas, their associates, and businesses at crucial junctures in what are known as the Sicomines agreements
The leaked files show that the shell company at the center of the scheme—Congo Construction Company (CCC)—received $55 million from foreign sources apparently intended for Kabila and his entourage. CCC later funneled $10 million back out to safety as the Kabila family faced losing both political power and control over the bank. All these funds transited the international financial system, flowing through major financial institutions like Citibank and Commerzbank to and from a country plagued by corruption, doing so under false pretenses and with little to no documentation, exposing how financial giants whose market values can dwarf the entire Congolese economy fail to protect the world’s poor from kleptocracy.
As their time at BGFIBank DRC came to an end, top executives at the bank, which is the subsidiary of a Gabonese corporate parent, battled a dogged internal auditor who accused them of money laundering, pointing to transactions that bore worrying indications of forgery and fraud. The auditor alleged that the executive team hid payments by moving bulk cash instead of making proper transfers and moved millions of dollars based on documents that appeared not to exist and for clients they hadn’t even fully identified. He also blamed them for stonewalling his inquiries and, in his own words, “blowing off” his concerns while generally operating .