NGO claims on mining royalties to be paid by Gécamines and CMOC
DYFREN, Dynamique des femmes sur les ressources naturelles, and the Carter Center warn Gécamines and the Ministry of Mines for the publication of the agreement on the conflict between Gécamines and the CMOC. These two partners in the TFM mining project signed this amicable agreement, but the amount CMOC owes to Gécamines is still unknown. DYFREN and the Carter Center therefore demanded the publication of this agreement not only to respect the obligations of the mining code but also to comply with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Standard.
The additional mining reserves discovered were around 179 million tons of copper between 2013 and 2022. According to the DYFREN report of August 2022 published with the support of the Carter Center, it is estimated that Gécamines lost more of 2,185,200,000.00 USD in additional royalties. However, TFM continued its research until 2022, thus increasing copper reserves and therefore additional royalties by nearly $34 million.
Baby Matabishi of the Carter Center believes that these funds would have been useful to carry out projects of national interest for the DRC while Gécamines could have allocated these revenues to its exploitation activities. DYFREN and the Carter Center hope that the agreement has allowed Gécamines to collect an amount estimated in billions of dollars.
The DRC is a country rich in natural resources, but this attracts the greed of the miners to give only a small share due to the State. Transparency on the amounts paid by mining companies would therefore be a first step towards fairer mining.