Qualla: Kalukundi mine

Kalukundi mine: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In September 2008, a Canadian mining company called Africo Resources told its shareholders that the deposit it was developing near Kolwezi was worth $1.47 billion. It was a big number, and it rested on a simple geological fact: the Central African Copperbelt is one of the richest metal-bearing belts on the planet, and Kalukundi sits right inside it. What happened next was not geological. It was legal, political and, according to US federal prosecutors, criminal. And a decade and a half later, the deposit is still mostly in the ground.

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Kalukundi mine: A Simple Ownership Structure

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kalukundi's legal skeleton is tidy on paper. The mining lease is held by a company called Swanmines, owned 75 percent by Africo Resources and 25 percent by the state mining company Gécamines. A 2006 feasibility study projected 800,000 tonnes of ore a year, yielding roughly 16,400...

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Kalukundi mine: The Dispute

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2007 a Congolese company called Akam Mining claimed it had acquired control of Swanmines. A superior court in Lubumbashi upheld that claim. In September 2007 the Congolese justice minister at the time, Georges Minsay Booka, directed Gécamines to disregard the court and treat A...

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Kalukundi mine: Och-Ziff

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bribes did not stay secret. Federal prosecutors in the United States traced a web of payments from Gertler through the hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management, which had been financing Gertler's African deals. In 2016 Och-Ziff agreed to pay a $412 million settlement as restitu...

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Kalukundi mine: Rock That Outlasts Paperwork

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Through all of it - the Akam ruling, the Gertler offer, the bribes, the settlement, the ownership handoffs - the deposit at Kalukundi sat where it had always sat, 65 kilometres from Kolwezi, under the red plateau. The workers who would have mined it, the families in the villages ...

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