change of strategy

From Washington to Kinshasa, Dan Gertler’s survival operation

By Romain Gras, Mathieu Olivier, Special correspondent in Tel-Aviv

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Posted on August 26, 2022 09:53

 © The agreement between the DRC and the Ventora group, owned by businessman Dan Gertler, was signed on 24 February 2022.
The agreement between the DRC and the Ventora group, owned by businessman Dan Gertler, was signed on 24 February 2022.

These days things are not going so well for the mining magnate: he is still under sanctions, Kabila has left power, the Biden administration does not appreciate him… However, since February 2022, he has concluded an agreement with the Congolese government. Will he manage to bounce back? Read on in the last episode of our series.

This is part 4 of a 4-part series

On 21 December 2017, night fell on Tel Aviv, and Dan Gertler was unreachable. Outside the synagogue that he is used to frequenting, cameras and journalists were waiting patiently to see him. The tycoon did not know it yet, but the knife had fallen. 19 of his companies and his right-hand man, Pieter Deboutte, who manages his business in Congo, had just been included in a first wave of sanctions in which he was the main target.

The US Treasury accused him of “using his friendship with Joseph Kabila to broker the sale of mining assets in the DRC, forcing certain multinationals to go through him.”

“Dan [Gertler] did not understand what was going on and did not measure the impact that these sanctions could have,” says one of his associates.

I was often told that all these reports were bad for my image, but I didn’t pay attention to them

These restrictive

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