How much will Glencore shell out to settle a corruption case in the Congo

6 December 20221 year ago babelfish

Glencore to pay a fine of 180 million to settle a corruption case in the Congo. The company is involved in many similar incidents, but will still post record profits in 2022

Anglo-Swiss mining company Glencore has said it will pay the Democratic Republic of Congo $180 million to settle a corruption charge. The sum covers a period of eleven years, from 2007 to 2018.

Glencore is one of the largest mining companies in the world: it is present in more than thirty-five countries and has over 135,000 employees.

1.6 BILLION FINES, BUT RECORD PROFITS

As the BBC recalls, Glencore is involved in several corruption cases, both in Africa and in Latin America, and this year it agreed to pay fines of over 1.6 billion dollars.

Nonetheless, the company is expected to report record profits of $3.2 billion in 2022.

GLENCORE'S INTERESTS IN CONGO

In May, the US Justice Department said Glencore had admitted to bribing officials in the Congo, paying an estimated $27.5 million, to secure trade advantages in the country.

The company has major interests in the Congo: it owns the Mutanda copper and cobalt mine and a controlling stake in the KCC project, also relating to the two metals.

Copper and cobalt are crucial raw materials for the energy transition to renewable sources: the first is necessary to build the connection cables of the wind and photovoltaic plants to the electricity grid; the second instead serves to make the batteries of electric vehicles. More than 60 percent of the world's supplies of cobalt come from the Congo, often extracted in conditions that violate human rights: child exploitation, for example, is frequent.

CORRUPTION CASES

In May Glencore admitted to paying multi-million dollar bribes to officials in Brazil, Cameroon, Congo, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, South Sudan and Venezuela.

A court in the UK last week ordered the company to pay a fine of more than £285 million over corruption in Africa fueled by the London-based commodities trading desk . According to the British judicial authorities, Glencore understood corruption as "part of the way of doing business in West Africa".

– Read also: With Glencore Is Tesla looking for its gold mine?

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/glencore-congo-corruzione/ on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 08:34:27 +0000.