Global Witness - monitoring av naturresurser

Global Witness is the recipient of a grant from SIDA which has the overarching goal of increasing transparency, accountability and sustainability in the natural resources sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The grant was originally for three years and was extended to a fourth year in 2017. As highlighted by the external evaluation carried out as part of this grant, the GW has achieved the following in the past four years of this grant: The Oil legislation The final text of the DRC Oil Law was passed in August 2015 by the President and includes a number of articles that Global Witness called for, namely: an open tender process requiring the publication of the names of concession applicants; the mandatory publication of contracts within 60 days; a clause stating that the government’s 20% participation in oil rights cannot be sold; and the requirement for an environmental audit, investigation and decree from the Council of Ministers before a protected area can be opened up to oil exploration. While this does not meet our demand to ban oil exploitation in protected areas, it is an improvement on previous drafts of the law. The Global Witness were one of very few international NGOs advocating for improvements to the oil law. The Mining Legislation? After three years of lobbying, Global Witness secured a commitment from the DRC government at the 2016 OECD Forum to sanction companies that had not reported on their OECD due diligence for 2014 and 2015, as required under DRC law.? Two companies in DRC – Mining Mineral Resources (MMR) and Congo Minerals and Metals (CMM) – reported close to OECD standard in 2015, which included details on multiple risks and the steps taken to mitigate them. This exceeds the SIDA target of one company.? The new mining code was signed into law on 9 March 2018. Transparency provisions remain unchanged from previous drafts, with encouraging mentions of contract publication and beneficial ownership disclosure (among other measures), but low on detail. The Gold? In response to the July 2016 report ‘River of Gold’, four individuals named in the report were detained in Kinshasa in October 2016, and illegal taxation and other unlawful behaviour by government authorities in South Kivu province temporarily dropped after the report’s release. The Corruption? New York hedge fund, Och-Ziff – linked to Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, a close friend of DRC’s embattled President Joseph Kabila – was ordered to pay $413m by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in September 2016. This is one of the biggest fines ever handed out for violating the FCPA. In September 2016 the US hedge fund Och-Ziff pled guilty to a bribery conspiracy in which it had partnered with Gertler, and less than six months later Glencore bought Gertler out of the two joint-ventures they owned together, though it continued to pay him royalties.? In a major victory for GW campaign, in December 2017 the US Government announced sanctions against Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, a close friend of DRC’s embattled President Joseph Kabila, and 19 entities linked to him. Another fourteen Gertler entities were sanctioned in June 2018. Gertler has been at the centre of several controversial mining and oil deals in DRC as a result of which it has been estimated that the country missed out on at least $1.4bn in potential revenues. The Global Witness has investigated and campaigned on Gertler’s deals for nearly a decade, including a focus on his international business partners at Glencore, ENRC (ERG), and Och-Ziff. As a result of the US sanctions commodities giant Glencore was temporarily forced to stop paying Gertler lucrative royalty fees (before resuming those payments in euros rather than dollars) while another of Gertler’s partners, gold miner Randgold, declared ‘force majeure’ on its deal with him. Glencore now also faces an investigation by the US Department of Justice, and a separate investigation by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, partly into its business in DRC. The Ontario Securities Commission also ruled in December 2018 that that Glencore’s subsidiary Katanga Mining, which owns and operates the huge Kamoto Copper Company (KCC) mining project in DRC, had failed to comply with disclosure requirements, including that it had not properly described risks of doing business with Gertler. Katanga was fined $22 million and several of Katanga’s current and former directors, including Glencore executives, were also named in the case, which was based on our exclusive revelations about Glencore’s secret royalty payments to Gertler. This led to a reduction in Glencore’s share price of 15%. The National Parks Our work exposing oil company Soco International’s corrupt activities in Virunga National Park resulted in Soco abandoning its claims to the block. The authorities in DRC launched an investigation into a Congolese army officer connected to the company’s activities, whilst the Church of England – a major investor in Soco – fully divested from the company following advocacy from Global Witness. GW's work to protect DRC’s UNESCO-protected forests from the fossil fuels industry continued in 2018 and 2019 as the published exposés about an opaque oil company acquiring exploration licences in Salonga National Park. As a result of the publications, the company committed in private correspondence to keep out of Salonga, but GW are pushing for a more binding commitment. The Corporate due diligence? The Global Witness participated extensively in a two-year “Alignment Assessment” led by the OECD, aiming to assess the alignment of industry due diligence schemes with the OECD standard. As a result, the six leading industry schemes all strengthened their standards, requiring their thousands of members, in turn, to meet stronger due diligence standards. The results developed will also form the basis of the European Commission’s accreditation of industry schemes under the new EU Regulation.? In March 2016, following Global Witness’s on-going engagement with the company, Apple provided specific details regarding supply chain risks in its Conflict Minerals Report to the SEC4 and got 100% of its smelters and refiners audited and certified as conflict free.

The programme describes how Global Witness intends to strengthen legal and regulatory frameworks in the DRC to ensure that DRC's mineral and oil resources are managed and traded in a way that benefits the Congolese people, and expose abusive actors and pushing for them to be held to account. It also describes objectives and proposed results for strengthening regulatory frameworks and standards and changing donor practices, in key international donor and trading states, and relevant international companies involved in natural resource extraction and trading. Finally, the programme demonstrates how it will contribute to limit the extent of industrial scale logging in DRC and significantly reduce the trade in illegal timber to Europe, whilst promoting sustainable forest use.