"Congo Hold-Up": a preliminary investigation for money laundering opened in France
Thursday 9 June 2022 - 06:50
Economy
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A preliminary investigation for "aggravated laundering of embezzlement of public funds" was opened in Paris after the complaint of associations following the revelations of the "Congo Hold-Up" report on possible embezzlement of public funds, indicated the National Financial Prosecutor's Office ( PNF) Wednesday.
https://www.cqu.edu.au/courses/stud...hQKKK82TAKWVd9KaVHsHjI3myC_4Vgo5rCiwqit-4HPAQ
by Taboola
In December, a coalition of media and NGOs published an investigation based on 3.5 million confidential bank documents from the Gabonese bank BGFI, obtained by the online media Mediapart and the NGO "Platform for the protection of launchers Alert in Africa (PPLAAF)".
It implicated the clan of the former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo Joseph Kabila.
Following a complaint filed jointly by the associations Unis, Transparency International and Sherpa, the PNF confirmed to AFP the information from Mediapart according to which it "has just opened" a preliminary investigation, entrusted to the Service d'Enquêtes Judiciaux des finance (SEJF).
The complaint mainly targeted the activities of the Paris-based bank BGFI Europe.
Mediapart indicated that this French subsidiary of the Gabonese bank BGFI had "transmitted, as a correspondent bank, tens of millions of dollars of suspicious transactions related to cases of corruption and embezzlement of public funds revealed by the investigations +Congo Hold- up+."
Among the operations targeted by the complaint, the validation by BGFI Europe of at least 32 transfers which would have been made or received by the Congolese company Sud Oil, for a total of more than 14 million dollars.
This company is suspected of having been "at the heart of the system which allowed the Kabila family to embezzle 138 million dollars of public money", according to Mediapart.
BGFI Gabon did not wish to comment on this investigation, "as it concerns a subsidiary".
BGFI Europe did not respond to requests from AFP.
“It is an investigation which was essential, to the extent of the exceptional evidence revealed by Congo Hold”, welcomed the lawyers of the associations, Mes William Bourdon and Henri Thulliez.
“At the heart of the investigation, it is the engineering of a bank which was decisive in a transnational system of systemic evaporation of public resources for gigantic amounts”, they estimated.
Mr. Kabila's lawyers had indicated in December that the latter "reserved the right to file a complaint" against a "Congo Hold-Up" file riddled with "malicious insinuations of rare aggressiveness".
Aged 51 today, Joseph Kabila became president in 2001. The current head of state and former opponent Félix Tshisekedi succeeded him in early 2019.
AFP with ACTUALITE.CD