Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, pictured here. (Image: Bloomberg Markets via YouTube.) The agreement “will allow us to promote and resell the assets,” government spokesman Patrick Muyaya told reporters at a briefing broadcast on Twitter Thursday. The government declined to make the full agreement available as the two sides continue to hammer out the details and because of confidentiality clauses, he said.
Gertler, 48, is from a prominent Israeli diamond family and came to Congo in the late 1990s to trade gems while the nation was at war. He helped finance President Laurent Desire Kabila and befriended his son, Joseph, who took power in 2001 when his father was assassinated. The men became close, with Gertler sometimes acting as a political emissary for Kabila. Opaque deals
They were also allegedly in business together, according to the U.S. government, which sanctioned Gertler in 2017 to help pressure Kabila into stepping down. Gertler, the U.S. Treasury Department said, used his “close friendship” with Kabila to amass a fortune “through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” in Congo.
Now a new government under President Felix Tshisekedi is trying to claw back some of those assets.
“Dan Gertler, as you all know, was one of the architects of a predatory system in this country,” Andre Wameso, Tshisekedi’s deputy chief of staff for economic matters, said on Thursday. “The assets of our republic were bought at very low prices by intermediaries, including by him, and were resold at a much higher value.”
Gertler has never been charged and has always denied any wrongdoing. He confirmed the outlines of the deal in a statement emailed by a spokesman Thursday. ‘Relentless scrutiny’
“The relentless scrutiny and criticism I have faced, culminating in the devastating U.S. sanctions placed on me and the recent allegations I have faced, have become intolerable, placing a huge burden on me, my businesses and above all my family,” Gertler said. “It is neither in my interests, nor the interests of the people of the DRC, for assets such as the Lake Albert blocks to be mired in international arbitration in perpetuity.”
The government values the oil blocks alone at between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion, Wameso said.
TotalEnergies SE controls the blocks on the Ugandan side of Lake Albert, and plans to invest more than $5 billion to drill and ship the crude via pipeline to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. […]
