Licoco Commends Primera Gold SA for Advancing Gold Supply Chain Traceability
The Congolese Anti-Corruption League (LICOCO) congratulates the company Primera Gold DRC SA for “its efforts to publish all its suppliers and mining sites which constitute its supply chain of Gold from artisanal mining”.
Licoco says that these elements are provided in the letter from Primera Gold DRC SA N/Ref. : PG-DRC/DG/JK/BBC/272/2023 of November 1, 2023 addressed to the United Nations Group of Experts.
In a press release received on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 the anti-corruption platform encourages the Congolese State Portfolio company to “also publish the taxes, fees, royalties and other rights paid to the structures of the State without waiting for the reports of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)”.
In the document signed by its executive secretary, Ernest Mpararo, Licoco makes recommendations to the government to: “duplicate the PRIMERA response in other provinces of North Kivu, Maniema, Tanganyika, Ituri, and Haut-Uélé to fight against mining fraud which illegally enriches neighboring countries, including Rwanda and Uganda; extend the same approach to the tin and copper-cobalt sectors of artisanal mining to capture and trace all production in the official circuit which escape the benefit of mafia and smuggling circuits; resolve the existing dispute between the SAKIMA Company and private companies working in the tin sector to fight against fraud which enriches neighboring countries, including Rwanda and Uganda; suspend activities in all mining sites belonging to politically exposed personalities who promote insecurity in the east of the DRC, like those exploited by the Corneil Nangaa family in Ituri and Haut-Uélé, today in rebellion for Rwanda’s account under the cover of M23 terrorists’.
To Primera Gold DRC SA, Licoco recommends: “expanding its due diligence, its traceability system to state structures to report mining sites controlled by armed groups and/or politically exposed personalities who support insecurity and instability in the East of the DRC in complicity with enemy powers and neighboring aggressor countries.
Primera Gold DRC SA is the result of the desire clearly expressed by all actors, particularly civil society, involved in mining governance, with the aim of seeing the government of the DRC, with the support of its specialized services, completely clean up the gold industry, at all levels of the supply chain.
For Licoco, this is an appropriate response to several decades of financing of insecurity through the activities of illicit exploitation and trade of artisanal gold in the east of the DRC in general and in the south. -Kivu in particular.
