19 media outlets together with five NGOs in the U.S. and Europe pored through 3.5 million leaked documents from a Gabonese bank to produce Congo Hold-Up, a landmark report that detailed breathtaking corruption in the DR Congo during the presidency of Joseph Kabila in the early 2000s.
Chinese entities, including the joint venture mining company Sicomines, were implicated in the findings (although Sicomines denies any allegation of corruption), specifically relating to the dealings of one man, Du Wei.
William Clowes and Michael Kavanagh, two senior journalists at Bloomberg News with extensive experience reporting in the DR Congo, were among the journalists who participated in the investigation. They spent six months working on the project and traced the activities of Du and the role he played as a middleman between Chinese corporate actors and power brokers in Kinshasa.
William and Michael join Eric & Cobus to discuss their reporting as part of the Congo Hold-Up investigation and the small role that Chinese entities played in this multimillion-dollar corruption scandal.
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