Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A former holding company of USsanctioned Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler will pay $30 million to settle a Dutch corruption probe over mining deals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, prosecutors said.
In 2018, Dutch investigators had launched a probe into whether Fleurette, a Netherlands-registered firm that served as the holding company for the Gertler group, and Swiss commodities giant Glencore paid bribes to secure copper and cobalt mining rights at below-market prices.
Investigators suspected that tens of millions of US dollars were paid to a top adviser of then-DRC President Joseph Kabila, a close friend of Gertler who ruled the mineral-rich yet conflictplagued country from 2001 to 2019. In a statement on March 10, the Dutch prosecutor’s office says it slapped Fleurette with a fine of 25.8 million euros ($30 million) on March 6. Lawyers for Fleurette told AFP that the fine brought the investigation to a close.
Gertler, who continues to wield significant influence in the DRC, was first sanctioned by the United States in 2017 for allegedly cheating the Congolese state of about $1.4 billion in revenues through opaque mining deals.
While US President Donald Trump reversed some of the sanctions just before the end of his first term, Washington put him back on the blacklist in March 2021.
In February 2022, the Congolese state announced it had reached an out-of-court settlement with Gertler, allowing the DRC to recover disputed mining and oil assets valued at more than $2 billion.
