{"id":24548,"date":"2023-01-27T15:31:20","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T15:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/mining-in-africa-and-beyond-concealed-origins"},"modified":"2023-01-27T15:31:20","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T15:31:20","slug":"mining-in-africa-and-beyond-concealed-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/mining-in-africa-and-beyond-concealed-origins","title":{"rendered":"Mining in Africa and beyond: Concealed origins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600\"><strong>Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. <\/strong><\/span><a name=\"start-reading\"><\/a>For years, Eastern DRC has been embroiled in one of the most murderous and complex conflicts in Africa. National forces, local fighters and foreign-backed militias have piled in, battling for political control, resources, borders and ethnic identity.<\/p>\n<p>Rampant smuggling and mislabelling of gold consignments to dodge local and national taxes, as well as international attempts to block gold from war zones, have shaped the region\u2019s gold industry.<\/p>\n<p>New refineries in the Great Lakes region can process more than 330tn of gold per year. You now have a supply chain in which gold is smuggled from Congo\u2019s war zones in Ituri and South Kivu to regional refineries, The UN experts say most of that is smuggled from eastern DRC.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Some refineries acted as brokers, used cash payments that evaded tracing, undertook refiner-to-refiner trading that concealed the origin of smuggled gold and used corporate networks, making it difficult to establish beneficial ownership,\u2019 says the report.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Most gold trading evaded formal banking networks.<br \/>\nThe biggest operations are the African Gold Refinery (AGR) in Uganda, with a capacity of 219tn a year, and the Aldango refinery in Rwanda, which can process 73tn a year.<\/p>\n<p>The UN experts refer to documents showing that Alain Goetz, a scion of a Belgian gold-trading family, founded AGR and has a stake in the Aldango refinery and a Dubai-based company called PGR Gold Trading.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou now have a supply chain in which gold is smuggled from Congo\u2019s war zones in Ituri and South Kivu to regional refineries,\u201d a former UN researcher told The Africa Report.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter that, it is flown to Dubai for re-refining, where it can be mixed with gold from other sources.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, gold from a war zone in Congo could end up in a gold bullion bar in Switzerland. \u201d<br \/>\nOn the DRC\u2019s north-eastern borders, in Sudan, the pattern is similar.<\/p>\n<p>Artisanal miners in conflict zones such as Blue Nile, Kordofan and, most of all, Darfur have been producing tonnes of gold, selling it to traders who smuggle it to the Gulf States.<\/p>\n<p>In 2018, Sudan produced about 93tn of gold, mines minister Adil Ali Ibrahim told Reuters in November 2019. That ranked it as the third-biggest producer after Ghana and South Africa.<\/p>\n<p>Between 2014 and 2018, Sudan officially exported gold worth $8.6bn, but its main trading partners recorded imports of Sudanese gold worth $12.7bn. \u201cThe biggest value gap is found in the trade between Sudan and the UAE,\u201d says Lakshmi Kumar, who led a research team for Washington DC-based Global Financial Integrity. That value gap of $4.1bn is most likely due to smuggling. That would be a revenue loss of more than $550m to the state in that period.<\/p>\n<p><strong>For More News And Analysis About <a href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\">Lesotho<\/a> Follow <a href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/\">Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. For years, Eastern DRC has been embroiled in one of the most murderous and complex conflicts in Africa. National forces, local fighters and foreign-backed militias have piled in, battling for political control, resources, borders and ethnic identity. Rampant smuggling and mislabelling of gold consignments to dodge local and national taxes, as well [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":24547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[242,233,246,245],"class_list":["post-24548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","tag-africa","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-lesotho","tag-lesotho"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.1 (Yoast SEO v27.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Mining in Africa and beyond: Concealed origins - Lesotho<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/mining-in-africa-and-beyond-concealed-origins\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mining in Africa and beyond: Concealed origins\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. For years, Eastern DRC has been embroiled in one of the most murderous and complex conflicts in Africa. National forces, local fighters and foreign-backed militias have piled in, battling for political control, resources, borders and ethnic identity. 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