page_title: Panama Papers (Africa)
section_title: Democratic Republic of Congo
hierarchical_section_title: Panama Papers (Africa) / Democratic Republic of Congo
caption_attribution_description: English: President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo meets with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon on Nov. 6, 2003.
context_page_description: The Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and were leaked in 2015 by an anonymous source.
  This page details related allegations, reactions, and investigations, in Africa.
  Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, head of the African Union's panel on illicit financial flows, on April 9 called the leak "most welcome" and called on African nations to investigate the citizens of their nations who appear in the papers. His panel's 2015 report found that Africa loses $50 billion a year due to tax evasion and other illicit practices and its 50-year losses top a trillion dollars. Furthermore, he said, the Seychelles, an African nation, is the fourth most mentioned tax haven in the documents.
context_section_description: From 1999 to 2002, the Kabila regime "transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state-mining sector to private companies under its control ... with no compensation or benefit for the State treasury", a United Nations investigation found.
  The US Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to help bring about the end of conflict diamonds and minerals in the US. The idea was that public opinion would force divestment over time. Section 1502 does not require divestment, but does mandate disclosure. But instead the disclosure requirement has simply meant new business opportunities for money launderers.
  As recently as 2014 the UN found that 70 percent of DRC gold was sold in Dubai without any problem, while gold continued to provide important funding for both the army and armed rebel groups.
caption: Laurent-Désiré Kabila's son and successor, Joseph Kabila
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