Fleurette Properties, the former Netherlands-registered holding company of US-sanctioned Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, paid €25.8 million ($30 million) on March 10 to settle an eight-year Dutch criminal investigation into bribery tied to copper and cobalt mining deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Dutch Public Prosecution Service confirmed it had issued a penal order against Fleurette on March 6, formally establishing that the company, acting with others, bribed foreign public officials in the DRC to obtain mining licences. No criminal charges were filed against any individuals, including Gertler himself.
- The investigation, launched in 2018, examined whether Fleurette and Swiss commodities giant Glencore paid bribes to secure copper and cobalt mining rights at prices well below market value. Investigators suspected that tens of millions of US dollars were channelled to Augustin Katumba Mwanke, a senior financial adviser to then-President Joseph Kabila, between 2010 and 2011. Katumba Mwanke died in a plane crash in 2012.
- Glencore’s involvement in the same DRC mining deals was resolved separately: the company paid a fine in Switzerland to close a parallel Swiss corruption investigation, after which Dutch investigators dropped their inquiry into Glencore.
- Fleurette, in a statement issued before the Dutch announcement, confirmed paying the settlement and insisted it closed the matter without charges against any individuals. The company said it maintained objections to parts of the evidentiary record but chose not to oppose the penal order to end the prolonged proceedings.
- Gertler was first sanctioned by the United States in 2017 for allegedly cheating the Congolese state of approximately $1.4 billion in revenue through opaque mining and oil deals. The Trump administration partially lifted those sanctions before leaving office in January 2021. The Biden administration reinstated them in March 2021. No agreement has been finalised on their current status under the second Trump term.
- In February 2022, the Congolese government reached a separate out-of-court settlement with Gertler’s Ventora Group, recovering disputed mining and oil assets valued at more than $2 billion.
The DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, supplying roughly 70% of global output, and holds some of the richest copper deposits on earth. The Gertler case is among the most documented examples of how the DRC’s mineral wealth has been systematically extracted through political relationships rather than competitive market processes. According to OCCRP, the DRC lost more than $1.3 billion in mining revenue between 2010 and 2012 alone through underpriced asset sales to offshore entities linked to Gertler.
Bigger picture: The $30 million settlement closes a Dutch legal chapter but does nothing to address the structural problem. The DRC’s mining governance framework remains fragile: licensing processes are opaque, regulatory enforcement is weak, and the country continues to receive a fraction of the economic value generated by its mineral assets. As global demand for cobalt and copper accelerates on the back of the energy transition, the DRC’s ability to capture sovereign value from those resources depends on reforms that have been promised for over a decade and repeatedly deferred. The Gertler case is a marker of how much has been lost. What matters now is whether the DRC uses its critical minerals leverage to build a different kind of deal structure for the next generation of mining agreements.
Sources: Africanews / OCCRP / Times of Israel / Fleurette press release
