UN experts: Gold from Congo going to armed groups

The panel said it found that North and South Kivu in eastern Congo and Ituri province in the northeast reported official production totaling just over 60 kilograms of surface-mined gold in 2019 and exported a total of just over 73 kilograms. The experts said Ituri's capital city Bunia remains a gold trading and smuggling hub where eight gold-buying houses each purchased a minimum of 2 to 3 kilograms of gold per week, according to three traders and a mining official.

UN experts say, armed groups, criminal networks, and some law enforcement agents in Congo are reaping vast sums of money from illegally exploiting gold and other natural resources and smuggling them to Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and the United Arab Emirates. The experts monitoring implementation of UN sanctions against Congo said in a report to the UN Security Council obtained Friday by The Associated Press that “the volumes of smuggled gold were significantly higher than the volumes of legally traded gold.” The council imposed sanctions on Congo after the end of back-to-back wars that destroyed much of the central African nation by 2002. Sporadic violence has continued to plague the vast nation's mineral-rich eastern border region where local militias regularly clash with one another, as well as with Congolese army forces and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The panel of experts said it traced Congolese gold “to regional refineries and other international destinations and found that some refineries acted as brokers, used cash payments, undertook refiner-to-refiner trading, and used corporate networks to obscure ownership, thereby inhibiting supply chain accountability.” Gold traders also avoided using formal banking networks, it said. The panel said it found that North and South Kivu in eastern Congo and Ituri province in the northeast reported official production totaling just over 60 kilograms of surface-mined gold in 2019 and exported a total of just over 73 kilograms.

The experts said Ituri's capital city Bunia remains a gold trading and smuggling hub where eight gold-buying houses each purchased a minimum of 2 to 3 kilograms of gold per week, according to three traders and a mining official. “On the basis of those quantities, the group estimated that a minimum of 1,100 kilograms of gold had been purchased and smuggled out of ... Congo in 2019 from Ituri alone, which could have generated up to $1.88 million in taxes had it been legally exported,” the panel said in the 42-page report.

Gold smuggled from Ituri was traded notably in Uganda's capital Kampala, the experts said, quoting two smugglers who described three recent trips from Bunia to Kampala with a combined total of 7 kilograms of gold, “which they sold to `Indian' traders.” According to seven smugglers, the panel said gold from South Kivu went to Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and the UAE.

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