The Carter Center’s report, State Affair: Privatization of Congo’s Copper Sector, is a comprehensive investigation into the contractual and financial practices of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s state-owned mining company, Gécamines. Among other things, the report reveals how Gécamines was able to use its privileged position to generate $1.1 billion from copper and cobalt transactions between 2011 and 2014. About two-thirds of this revenue—$750 million—cannot be reliably traced in the company’s records.

Affaire d’Etat is the culmination of several years of research and is based on 200 interviews, a review of more than 100 mining contracts, at least 1,000 company documents, as well as reports from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) covering the period 2007-2014.

The central story is taken up in “Gécamines: a parallel state”. This first part documents how Gécamines used its portfolio of assets to generate considerable revenues, the use of which is difficult to trace. This document is available below.

This first part will be accompanied by four case studies on some of the most important mining projects in the Congolese copper arc. These studies illustrate in more detail the overall trends in the sector and will be published in the coming weeks.

You can download the English version of the document here and the French version of the document here