NGOs Plead for Maintenance of American Sanctions and Call on DRC Justice to Prosecute Authors of the SICOMINES Contract
Gathered in Kolwezi, Lubumbashi and Kinshasa, in citizens’ cafés, civil society organizations and citizens’ movements are pleading with the US Treasury to maintain the sanctions imposed against Mr. Dan Gertler for acts of corruption committed in Democratic Republic of Congo.
Indeed, the acts of corruption committed by Dan Gertler, in complicity with certain Congolese leaders, cause the public treasury to lose hundreds of thousands of US dollars per day to the benefit of individuals, and keep the Congolese population in poverty.
This is why civil society organizations and citizen movements condition the lifting of American sanctions by:
The publication of all the annexes to the memorandum of understanding signed on February 24, 2022 between the Congolese State and the Ventora group;
The revision of this memorandum of understanding by evaluating the real value of all the mining and oil assets that are the subject of the memorandum of understanding, by specialized firms;
Pure and simple recovery, by the Congolese party, of the royalties received and to be collected, from the companies KCC, MUTANDA and METALKOL;
The opening of judicial inquiries and prosecution of all perpetrators involved in these agreements.
In addition, the coalition congratulates the General Inspectorate of Finance “IGF” which has just published the report on the SICOMINES contract. This report, which confirms the alerts of civil society, reveals enormous losses and shortfalls recorded by the Congolese public treasury for more than 10 years.
The coalition recommends that the Congolese courts take up this case in order to recover all the billions lost in this “contract of the century”, urgently renegotiate this contract to make it balanced and allow the Congolese people to benefit from the mineral wealth of their country.
