dirty money by matthew benns sample chapter

Copyright © Matthew Benns 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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A William Heinemann bookPublished by Random House Australia Pty LtdLevel 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by William Heinemann in 2011

Copyright © Matthew Benns 2011

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Benns, Matthew. Dirty money/Matthew Benns.

ISBN: 978 1 74275 000 2 (pbk.)

Mineral industries. Primary commodities – Developing countries. International business enterprises – Developing countries. Developing countries – Economic conditions. Developing countries – Social conditions. Developing countries – Politics and government.

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O N E

Death in the Congo

‘They put the boys into the Anvil Mining truck. They came for my dad. I asked them “where are you taking him?” and they didn’t answer.’ Schoolboy Albert Kitanika.1

Elsewhere townspeople living next door to the remote but highly profitable Australian-owned copper mine were scattering in panic. Heavily armed soldiers clambered from the Australian trucks looking for rebel sympathisers. ‘We started running but the soldiers caught and searched our belongings; they arrested my dad and two other boys,’ said the terrified schoolboy. The soldiers refused to say where they were taking his father. ‘They took him 50 metres down the road where they shot and stabbed him to death.’ The soldiers came back, alerted by the boy’s cries for his father, but he hid behind one of the trucks. The rebels, protest-ing at the way the Australian company was mining the Congolese silver and copper but giving little back to the local community, had already surrendered. But their theft of food and fuel from the Anvil Mining depot at Kilwa in the Democratic Republic of Congo could not go unanswered. Anvil Mining had powerful friends.

Another father, still too frightened to give his name, told how his terrified young son was arrested by the soldiers. His son,

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sobbing by now, was loaded with his neighbour and ten other locals into an Isuzu truck belonging to the Australian mine company. They were driven to Nsensele. His neighbour said, ‘We were lined up along the ditch to be shot. I was in a state, lost con-sciousness and fell suddenly into the ditch, while the other bodies piled up on top of me. When I regained consciousness I realised that I and another man, both covered in blood, were safe. I began to walk into the bush without knowing where I was going until night fell when I came to the village of Mutwale.’2 For three days the desperate father searched everywhere for his son before finally finding a neighbour in the village. ‘My neighbour called out to me and told me that the blood in which his clothes was covered was my son’s.’ Two mass graves and a single grave were later found at Nsensele.

Others tried to flee across Lake Moero.3 Schoolboy Jean-Pierre Mugalu was hiding in the hospital with his family while they waited for a boat. He decided to run home and collect his school-books. His family never saw him alive again. Eyewitnesses told his cousin the soldiers killed the boy on suspicion of his being a rebel.

Katayi Lidy made it to a boat and was crossing the lake with her tiny baby and members of her family when the soldiers opened fire with rocket launchers. The boat capsized and she lost hold of two-month-old Kabila Ntundu Donatien. The baby and eight immedi-ate members of her family drowned. Katayi was only saved because her sister, groping in the darkness, pulled her out by her hair.

Everywhere the rampaging soldiers wreaked terror. Salted-fish business owner Adele Nwayuma fled into the bush with her two youngest children. Her eldest sons, 21-year-old Yuma Lukumani

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Ulimwengu and 19-year-old Willy Nombele Ulimwengu, insisted on staying behind to protect the family home and property. When she finally returned to the village four days later, she found the door of the house forced open, bloodstains on the floor and the contents looted. She began a desperate search for her boys. ‘At the time, I wasn’t sure they were dead. But then I saw the soldiers with my sons’ bicycles. They were using them to carry the things they’d stolen. Then I realised my sons were dead,’ she said.

Paul Kabulo was arrested by the soldiers and watched in horror as his friends and neighbours were murdered. ‘They arrested three people, tied them to a tree, and beat them to death. I saw it with my own eyes,’ he later told the ABC. ‘Anvil Mining offered them cars, which they used to carry the things they stole from us. They used their trucks for looting the houses and shops.’

In total, it is estimated more than 100 people were murdered in what a United Nations investigation found was a series of exe-cutions, looting, extortion and illegal detention that investigators suspected was organised by high-ranking military officials.4 But what is equally horrifying to Australians proud of the nation’s reputation around the world is the part played in the massacre by an Australian company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). The story of what happened at Kilwa in the Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo began with an ambitious Australian entrepreneur’s search for riches buried in the ground in Africa. It has continued years after the bloodletting with court cases and a class action filed at the end of 2010 in a Canadian court.

It is a dirty story of dirty money.

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—

Bill Turner is a career miner. He worked for 25 years in Central and South-East Asia and Africa, spending 10 years with gold explorer Dominion Mining as its general manager, Indonesia, and its special projects manager, Australia, before kickstarting his own project in 1996. Mr Turner looked to the troubled coun-tries of Africa to build his empire. He needed a rich deposit to put Anvil Mining on the map and the place to find it was one of the world’s poorest countries, with untapped deposits buried in the ground estimated at $24 trillion – the equivalent of the entire Gross Domestic Product of the United States and Europe combined.

Turner was not the first person to see the potential. At the start of the last century, King Leopold II of Belgium made a for-tune from rubber plantations in what was then called the Congo Free State. Plantation owners regularly cut off the hands and feet of people who failed to meet their rubber quotas. By the 1970s the Belgian Congo, the setting of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, had become known as Zaire under the corrupt rule of President Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Mobutu reduced the country to grinding poverty while salting away $4 billion in a personal Swiss bank account – virtually enough to pay off the country’s crippling national debt, if it had been used properly.

It was in the dying days of this regime, in the late 1990s, that Mr Turner arrived and worked his way to the remote Katanga province on the Zaire–Zambia border, 350 kilometres north of Lubumbashi. Here he found a deposit of some of the highest-grade

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copper and silver in the world. Mr Turner himself described the Dikulushi mine as a company maker. The mine transformed the Perth-based mining company from a start-up with shares worth 5 cents to an Australian giant with a market capitalisation of $100 million. Not only that, Mr Turner managed to get the mine up and running despite the carnage of what was termed the African World War. To do so, he needed the help of powerful friends.

The right-hand man of President Joseph Kabila in the politi-cally vital stronghold of Katanga is Katumba Mwanke. The United Nations Panel of Experts in 2002 found that Mr Mwanke was one of an elite group responsible for the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The panel said Mr Mwanke was a ‘key power broker in mining and diplomatic deals’ and recommended he be banned from international travel and placed under financial restrictions.5 Exactly the man then that Bill Turner and Anvil Mining needed on the board of their Congo company.

Mr Turner has only given one interview since the Kilwa massacre: a bruising encounter with ABC Four Corners reporter Sally Neighbour. In it she asked him how a one-man start-up company from Perth managed to get one of the most lucrative mining concessions in the world which, at its peak, was truck-ing out $500,000 worth of ore every single day. Mr Turner said it was all about being there at the right time and had nothing to do with political assistance. She asked him three times about Mr Mwange’s role in the company before Mr Turner sud-denly remembered that the powerful African was, for at least three years, the Congolese government’s representative on Anvil’s

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Congo board. Mr Turner was keen to point out that Mr Mwange had no stake in the company and had only been paid for the board meetings he attended – less than $5000.

Only when it was pointed out to him did Turner also concede that Anvil’s headquarters in Lubumbashi were in Mr Mwanke’s personal compound and that the company paid him $50,000 a year for the hire of the building. But a non-government organi-sation in Lubumbashi called ADASHO had also investigated Mr Mwanke’s relationship with Anvil mining. Spokesman Freddy Kitoko said, ‘The problem with Anvil Mining is that, in relation to the mining exploitation, it is a company that does not pay any taxes to the government. In fact, it’s signed an agreement with the government to be exempt from taxes. This facility was arranged by Katumba Mwanke, who is the former governor of Katanga.’ In fact, Anvil mining’s tax break was geared so that it would only begin to pay taxes as the short life of the mine ran out. Former mining minister Eugène Diomi Ndongala, himself sacked for corruption, has also pointed the finger at Mwanke, saying that Mwanke had promoted Anvil with his contacts and relations and intervened on Anvil’s behalf. For his part, Mr Mwanke denied having anything to do with Anvil Mining.

So when 20-year-old local fisherman Alain Kazadi Makalayi decided to launch a revolution, exploiting the bitterness people felt towards the Australian-owned mine at Dikulushi, he was not just going up against a foreign-owned business in a remote part of the country. Powerful people were watching. Kazadi was count-ing on local support. He knew many of the 48,000 residents of nearby Kilwa were angry to see ore being trucked out that was

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worth almost $100,000 a load while they were barely surviving on an average income of less than $1 a day. What he could not have expected was the reaction his revolution produced.

The revolution began on 14 October 2004 at around 2 am when Kazadi led a small group of six or seven men, including a retired soldier who was his uncle, into Kilwa and declared himself general-in-chief of the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Katanga (MRLK, in French: Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Libération du Katanga). They were poorly armed but met with no resistance from the 10 or 20 soldiers stationed in Kilwa or the local police. Two soldiers who did not rally to the rebels cause were seen with their hands tied behind their backs in the local primary school teacher’s house, but others freely wandered around the town dressed in their civilian clothes. The insurgents armed themselves with five pistols and ammunition from the police station and 17 guns from the mili-tary armoury.

Police chief Pierre Kunda Musopelo said, ‘When the rebel leader, Kazadi, and his men arrived on the night of 14 October 2004, I asked all my police officers to come and protect the town. I tried to contact the Army High Command but four rebels hit me and took away my weapon. Then they took me to Kazadi, who told me that I would face a popular trial the next day. If local people said that I had committed “tracasseries” [bribery, harass-ment] it would be bad for me. Kazadi then made for the harbour to try to find a radio: he wanted to contact Anvil.’6 Police Chief Kunda managed to ‘slip away’ on the way to the harbour and hid in a nearby village.

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Meanwhile another 40 Congolese insurgents joined the ini-tial group from the island of Nshimba, 7 kilometres away. On his way to the Anvil Mining petrol depot, Kazadi stopped at the office of Médecins Sans Frontières to use their comms radio. He was disappointed it could not connect him to the BBC to tell the world of his arrival, but he used it to tell the local population he had money set aside in South Africa to buy fishing nets and trac-tors. Kazadi then went to the market and told locals that the days of ‘pocketing money from the mines’7 were over for President Kabila and Katumba Mwanke. He told the people other villages were due to fall to the revolution that day and that the move-ment was supported by well-placed officials and the military in his hometown of Pweto.

United Nations special investigators later concluded he was naive, poorly equipped and had been manipulated by other par-ties, possibly high-ranking Congolese military officers. But at the beginning, the general-in-chief of the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Katanga was on a high and thought he was really the start of something much bigger. Once at the Anvil Mining depot, Kazadi demanded petrol and told the people to contact the ‘white people’ at Anvil’s Dikulushi mine, 30 kilo-metres to the north, and tell them that the insurgents had no intention of disrupting the mine’s activities. The Anvil staff at the petrol depot refused to negotiate and the insurgents became angry until the petrol was finally distributed.

The next morning, Kazadi distributed stolen weapons to his followers. Eyewitnesses reported that many of the new recruits had either been promised payment for joining or bullied into it.

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Many were reported to be young boys with no experience of han-dling weapons. They excitedly fired the guns into the air until people complained and Kazadi told them to stop. At the end of the morning Kazadi told his supporters to go home for lunch. It was a very civilised uprising. As the insurgents toddled off, 90 per cent of the local population took the opportunity to do a runner into the bush. There was no evidence that the entire province had been liberated and that they knew the FARDC, the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (in French: Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo), would soon be on its way.

Meanwhile Anvil Mining had issued a press release saying it had been in contact with the rebel leader who ‘is not dressed in uniform and wears sandals’8 and that he had made it clear there was no threat to the mine. As a precaution, the company had decided to fly out a total of 75 non-essential staff from the mine. The group security manager, mining manager and secu-rity staff remained. ‘The company expects the situation to be resolved within the next 72 hours,’ the press release said. On the ground, Anvil Mining Congo’s Canadian general manager, Pierre Mercier, was in Kinshasa and frantically calling the Congolese military intelligence service – the ANR, which also had agents at the mine – and military officials to see what the situation was. He called the airport and arranged for the mine staff to be flown out on chartered planes. Mr Mercier then received a request ‘that was more an order to provide logistical means to the FARDC to allow them to retake Kilwa.’9 It would take three flights to get all the mine staff out and Mr Mercier arranged for them to fly troops of the 62nd Brigade back on the return flights.

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Once the troops arrived, Anvil Mining provided them with vehicles and drivers to get to Kilwa. In part of an ABC interview that was not broadcast, Mr Turner said, ‘Can you imagine us sitting there expecting the protection of the government. We’ve got all these vehicles there and these soldiers just making their 200-kilometre trip down to Kilwa … could we just sit there and let these guys walk past the mine? I don’t think so.’ When pushed on exactly how many vehicles were sent, Mr Turner snapped, ‘What difference does it make how many vehicles? There are a group of soldiers, and whatever number of vehicles was necessary to move these guys, I guess we sent [that many] up there and they moved them down.’ He also confirmed that the mine’s security chief, ‘Cedric’ (believed to be Cedric Kirsten, Anvil Mining’s former security manager at Dikulushi) was responsible for call-ing the shots for the company on the ground during the upris-ing. Several eyewitness accounts refer to Cedric being there and liaising with troops in the Anvil vehicles, which were also being driven by Anvil staff.

Leading the FARDC troops was Colonel Adémar Ilunga, whose nickname, Kisu Makali Kote Kubya, means ‘evil in all respects with a sharp knife’ and has clearly very ominous con-notations. He was later sentenced to life imprisonment for the arbitrary detention and murder of two young men in Pweto a year after the Kilwa massacre. He was acting on high author-ity. President Joseph Kabila had given orders to the commander of the 6th military region ‘to do everything possible to retake Kilwa within 48 hours.’10 Colonel Adémar wasted no time. But according to the residents of Kilwa, it was only when the

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military arrived, in Anvil Mining vehicles, that the lootings and killings began.

On the afternoon of 15 October, Colonel Adémar began with a bombardment of Kilwa that destroyed five or six houses and then sent in his troops to engage the insurgents around the market and on the road to the airport. No soldiers died in the ensuing one-to-two-hour fight. The soldiers then began the house-to-house searches and summary executions of the people of Kilwa. Before moving in, the army was told to ‘shoot anything that moves’.11 They obeyed orders. United Nations investigators reported at least 100 people had been summarily executed, shot, beaten to death or drowned in the lake. The final number may never be known.

Police chief Kunda said he was found at the village where he was hiding by Colonel Adémar, who had sent his troops out in the Anvil trucks to recall the population. ‘When I reached Kilwa, I was arrested and beaten. Adémar accused me of joining the rebels and said, “Your fate is sealed, you will be killed.” I was then shut up in a small room with about 48 other people. We were jammed in so tightly no one could move or sit down. It only could hold 10 people. It was hot and we were unable to breathe – four people died.’12 He knew one of the soldiers, Lieutenant Lofete, who would let him out for fresh air when Lofete’s boss was not around.

The police chief said he saw the white Anvil employees visit-ing Colonel Adémar and being quite comfortable in his com-pany. Colonel Adémar came to the cramped holding cell on two occasions and took other detainees away in the Anvil trucks.

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Lieutenant Lofete told the police chief to pray for them, because they were being taken to ‘the slaughterhouse’.13 Meanwhile, Police Chief Kunda’s 22-year-old daughter, who was seven months preg-nant and engaged to be married, was tracked down by FARDC soldiers who knew she was his daughter. Three of the soldiers raped and sexually assaulted her. She was left paralysed after giving birth and died three months after the rape. Her father was transferred to the headquarters of the 6th Military Region in Lubumbashi and held incommunicado for a month while the soldiers continued to torture him. He was then moved to Kazapa prison before a military court tried and acquitted him of treason. Finally free, Police Chief Kunda’s health was irrevocably dam-aged and he died a broken man five years later.

The short-lived bid for power by fisherman Kazadi, the general-in-chief of the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Katanga, ended just outside the town the following night when FARDC soldiers shot him in the hand and back. When Colonel Adémar visited him in hospital, Kazadi accused him of being a traitor. The furious colonel angrily denied he was part of the plot and tore out Kazadi’s drip. He died in hospital.

Anvil Mining confirmed to the UN investigators that it had supplied three drivers with its trucks and had paid some of the soldiers. It said it provided food to the troops to prevent local shops and homes from being looted. That didn’t work. When the townspeople finally returned, after a visit from Katumba Mwanke himself, urging them to come back, the soldiers were seen selling the looted goods to the very people they had stolen them from. The soldiers stayed for nine months and residents told UK charity

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Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) that they were not allowed to mourn in public, hold wakes or move the bodies of their loved ones from the mass graves for proper burial.

While they grieved in private, the Anvil quarterly report for December, just two months after the massacre, neglected to tell shareholders in Australia and Canada that its vehicles had been loaned to the military to quell the uprising and move the bodies afterwards. However, it did say, ‘the government and military response on both provincial and national levels was rapid and supportive of the prompt resumption of operations.’14 The World Bank’s compliance-advisor ombudsman had less flattering things to say about the Australian company when it published its report into the Dikulushi mine. ‘Neither Anvil nor MIGA [Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency] sought to investigate the human rights record of the military and police detachments deployed at the site and in the wider area, as required by the provisions of the Voluntary Principles,’ it said.15

Finally, in October 2006, Colonel Adémar, along with seven of his soldiers and one in absentia, was accused of war crimes by the Congolese Military prosecutor. The charges included arbitrary detention, torture, rape and murder. The most serious charge related to the summary execution of 20 men and five women at Nsensele. Anvil’s former general manager in the DRC, Canadian Pierre Mercier; the former head of mine security, South African Peter van Niekerk; and a third South African, named only as Cedric (again believed to be former security manager Cedric Kirsten) were accused of not withdrawing the mine company vehicles placed at the soldiers disposal. They were also accused of having ‘knowingly

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facilitated the commission of war crimes by Adémar Ilunga and his men.’16 At the start of the trial the military prosecutor made it clear that the three men had been charged and not the company. Only if the employees were found guilty would the company have to pay damages. For its part, Anvil Mining issued a press release reassuring shareholders in Australia and Canada that ‘the allegations against Anvil Mining Congo SARL and the above mentioned persons are unfounded and without merit.’17

The trial, once underway, was marred by the sudden transfer to another jurisdiction of the prosecutor who had conducted the investigation that led to the charges. When the adjourned trial began again with a different prosecutor, NGOs and charities observing the courtroom drama were angered by his lack of any cross-examination of the Anvil employees over their version of events on the requisitioning of vehicles. At the end of the trial the new prosecutor concluded there was insufficient evidence to show that the three Anvil Mining employees had committed any war crimes and recommended the charges against them be dropped. Returning its verdict in June 2007, the Military Court found Adémar and his soldiers not guilty of war crimes. Furthermore it found that no summary executions had taken place and that the rebels had been killed in the fierce fighting with FARDC soldiers. An attempt by the victims and their families to appeal was later denied and Colonel Adémar and his cohort had their sentences for the Pweto killings (a year after the Kilwa massacre) reduced to five years and were reinstated in the FARDC.

The Congolese media largely left the case unreported; local journalists told charity workers that they had been pressured by

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the government not to cover the trial. The charity workers them-selves claimed to have received threatening phone calls. After the case, Louise Arbour, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement, ‘I am concerned at the court’s conclusions that the events in Kilwa were the accidental results of fighting, despite the presence at the trial of substantial eyewitness testimony and material evidence pointing to the commission of serious and deliberate human rights violations.’18

Anvil moved on. It wound up operations at the Dikulushi mine and started to mine the Kinsevere deposit in the same Katangan copperbelt of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mine produced 16,406 tonnes of copper concentrate in 2009, worth almost $50 million, and was on target to produce 60,000 tonnes once stage two of the Kinsevere mine was brought on stream. The global financial crisis slowed things down and the company needed a $200-million debt and equity cash injection to keep things moving. Anvil gave up 36 per cent of its stock and brought in three new directors from its new major stakeholder in order to finance the mine. It chose as its partner Trafigura Beheer BV – the Dutch company responsible for one of the worst envi-ronmental disasters in African history.

In 2006, Trafigura, one of the world’s largest independent oil trading firms, bought a large quantity of contaminated gasoline, coker naptha, from a refinery in Mexico which could not proc-ess the dirty by-product of its operations. An internal email from Trafigura at the time said, ‘This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars.’19 But to make that money, the company needed to clean up the dirty fuel. Trafigura chartered

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the Panamanian ship Probo Koala and pumped the dirty fuel aboard. Once the ship was off the coast of Gibraltar, the company used an experimental process called ‘caustic washing’ to clean the fuel. Effectively, it pumped tonnes of caustic soda and catalyst in with the fuel to clean it. The method is cheap but produces deadly waste, known as slops, which renders the process illegal in most parts of the world. Another internal email warned, ‘This opera-tion is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore.’ It added that the practice was ‘banned in most countries due to the hazardous nature of the waste’.

The cleaned fuel was sold at a profit but the problem was what to do with the sulphurous slops left swilling around in the tanks of the Probo Koala. Mr Claude Dauphin, president of Trafigura, urged his staff to ‘be creative’ in dealing with the waste. The Dutch-registered company firstly tried to get rid of the slops in Amsterdam, claiming they were the ‘dirty water’ leftovers of normal tank cleaning. However, the smell was so bad when they were pumped ashore that the emergency services were called. The company was told the waste was highly toxic and would cost hundreds of thousands of euros to clean and dispose of prop-erly. The company baulked at the high cost and the slops were pumped back aboard the Probo Koala.

The ship then headed to the Canaries, Lome, Togo and Lagos, Nigeria before ending up in Abidjan, the biggest city in the Ivory Coast, where contractor Solomon Ugburogbu and his company Tommy agreed to take the waste. The company had never done any work of this nature before and only had a licence for ship refuelling. But its price was 20 times lower than in Amsterdam.

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A total of 500 tonnes of highly toxic slops were pumped off the ship. Tanker drivers were told it was dirty water and at night they fly-tipped truckload after truckload of the toxic waste at 15 loca-tions around Abidjan. Within days, thousands of people were seeking medical help for nose bleeds, stomach pains, skin burns, sickness and diarrhoea. Over 100,000 people needed medical treatment and 17 died.

When the BBC produced a harrowing report with blistered victims telling of their physical ailments, Trafigura responded by calling in the lawyers. It consistently denied any wrongdoing – even when the Ivory Coast government was forced to resign over the scandal. But quietly, just weeks after the dumping of the waste, Trafigura commissioned a report, known as the Minton Report, to investigate just how toxic the waste really was. Despite the find-ings of this report, Trafigura subsequently rejected the findings of a toothless Ivorian-government investigation into the incident which condemned Trafigura and port officials, suggesting the company Tommy, which dumped the waste, had been set up specifically for that task. A British law firm began a class action on behalf of the victims and later Trafigura agreed to pay $200 million compensa-tion while still not accepting any liability for the mess.

The matter rumbled on in various courts with Trafigura’s aggressive lawyers threatening expensive legal action and closing down any news reports, at one stage even forcing the BBC into silence. In September 2009, just before Trafigura agreed to settle a legal claim and pay 31,000 victims around $2000 each, while still insisting the waste had merely brought on flu-like symptoms, the Guardian newspaper in the UK got hold of a leaked copy of

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Trafigura’s own Minton Report. Trafigura was not happy. It let loose legal attack dogs Carter-Ruck, who placed a ‘super-injunc-tion’ on the newspaper, preventing it from revealing any details. When British MP Paul Farrelly asked a question in parliament on the Minton Report, the super-injunction prevented newspapers from reporting his question – effectively challenging hundreds of years of privilege that allows journalists to report anything that is said in parliament.

The threat to freedom of speech prompted a storm of outrage on Twitter, and the High Court injunction banning the mention of the report was lifted. Afterwards Pierre Lorinet, Trafigura’s chief financial officer, told the Daily Telegraph in London that the company had acted to prevent inaccurate reporting. ‘It is a heavy-handed approach, absolutely. With hindsight, could it have been done differently? Possibly’, he said. ‘The injunction was never intended to gag parliament or attack free speech.’20 And he was keen to stress that the report was only preliminary anyway. The report’s author, John Minton, said, ‘Any suggestion that the draft September 2006 report was anything other than an initial desktop study, which remained in draft and which was quickly superseded when we were first provided with reliable facts, would be wholly incorrect.’21 So what was Trafigura so keen to hush up?

The Minton Report found that the toxic mix of chemicals was ‘capable of causing severe human health effects’. 22 These included ‘headaches, breathing difficulties, nausea, eye irritation, skin ulceration, unconsciousness and death.’ It also warned that the breakdown of the chemicals in the environment could release highly toxic hydrogen sulphide, which can kill. The dumping of

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the corrosive, highly flammable waste was also against European Union rules.

The unauthorised release of the Minton Report was a public relations disaster for Trafigura. When it attempted to correct this with a series of ads in Holland in 2010 saying that it ‘always aims for a proper adherence to its economic and social activities in the West African region’,23 it was rapped on the knuckles by the Dutch advertising-standards commission for being misleading.

In July 2010 a Dutch court fined Trafigura over $1.5 million for illegally exporting hazardous waste and said it had concealed the dangerous nature of that waste. Just before the case began, a Nova TV documentary ran in Holland with the drivers from the Ivory Coast, who had been hired to dump the waste, show-ing statements made to the London courts that they had signed and now said were false. ‘This is the statement I drew up with Trafigura’s lawyers,’ said one of the drivers. ‘There are several incorrect paragraphs in this statement. They are false. For exam-ple, paragraph 70 reads, “During the loading my clothes were stained but I didn’t experience any ill effects.” That is not cor-rect.’24 And he went on, ‘Where the stuff touched my skin, I could feel it burn. My skin peeled.’ The driver said he was contacted by a Congolese middleman and flown first-class to Morocco – he produced his boarding cards as proof – and met with repre-sentatives from Trafigura. He had a photograph of himself with a lawyer from Trafigura’s law firm, Macfarlanes. The drivers said they were paid hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of euros to sign the false statements. ‘The idea was that we would go to England to testify to all who would listen that the waste had no

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effects on us. Trafigura wanted us to lie under oath,’ said one. Greenpeace has attempted to verify the drivers’ claims.

The year before, Leigh Day & Co, the lawyers putting together the class action on behalf of the victims, had accused Macfarlanes of attempting to influence claimants to change their statements, paying for one to fly to Morocco and offering him inducements. The accusations were later withdrawn as part of the overall settlement. Macfarlanes admitted meeting the claimant and paying for his travel. The lawyers maintained they had acted ethically and had ‘never acted improperly or offered any induce-ments whatsoever to any witnesses or claimants.’25 Doing so would ‘have been obviously wrong and unethical, not to mention unlawful. It would also have been utterly pointless to have offered any inducement to that or any other individual, as this would have wholly undermined their evidence when examined in court.’

And this was the company that Australia’s own Anvil Mining chose to get into bed with in Africa. Anvil had moved on from its own PR disaster at the Dikulushi mine – which it closed down, leaving 10 per cent of the equity to the local community – and was tackling bigger projects. With the Kinsevere mine, Anvil took positive steps to publicly clean up its act. Fourteen years after first going to the Democratic Republic of Congo and six years after the Kilwa massacre, it joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which aims to set a global standard in mining with both companies and governments publishing what they pay and receive. It was one of a raft of socially responsible programs the company undertook.

But for Bill Turner and the directors of Anvil Mining, the Kilwa

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incident will just not go away. In November 2010 an association of human rights groups representing Congolese victims of the mas-sacre filed a class action against Anvil in a Montreal court, since Anvil is also listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange. ‘This case is now in Canada because Anvil is a Canadian company, and must be held accountable for any role it played in what were clear and egregious violations of human rights,’ said Matt Eisenbrandt, legal coordinator of the Canadian Centre for International Justice.26 Anvil responded: ‘Over the past several years, the incident and Anvil have been subject to numerous investigations and court proceedings both in and outside the DRC. No findings adverse to Anvil or any of its employees have arisen in respect of the Kilwa incident in any of the foregoing. Anvil has not had the opportunity to review the allegations in detail but intends to defend itself.’27

The company was faced with a barrage of publicity. Victims spoke out. ‘Every day is a struggle to survive and we feel aban-doned,’ said Dickay Kunda, son of the brutally tortured police chief. ‘We have no option but to turn to the international com-munity for justice.’28 And Tricia Feeney, director of UK-based RAID, said, ‘Anvil’s material support enabled the Congolese army to reach the remote town of Kilwa at top speed – where they then carried out widespread abuses against the civilian population.’29

Anvil Mining remains haunted by its former attitudes. During the ABC interview about the Kilwa incident, reporter Sally Neighbour pushed Bill Turner on the military’s use of Anvil vehi-cles to carry out the atrocities.

He replied, ‘So what?’

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DEATH IN THE CONGO



dirty money by matthew benns sample chapter

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