{UAH} Allan: Is that true? DRC Road deal

Many people were wondering why Ugandan government would jump so fast to the conclusion of constructing roads in Congo whereas we have many road in Uganda including in Kampala suburbs which are un tarmaced. 

Here is the real story behind this. 

Many of you could by now have come accross a video of African Gold Refinary(AGR) which has been making rounds on social media lately, i believe just like me, you were asking yourself, who owns this company? 

Yes, there are sources which will tell you the company belongs to a Belgian billionare called Alain Goetz but disregard such sources, the company now belongs to one of the first family members. 

In the beginning of this year, Two brothers from a Belgian gold refinery were found guilty by a court in Antwerp-Belgium of money laundering and fraud and given 18-month suspended jail sentences. 

The court ruling said Alain and Sylvain Goetz set up a fraudulent system in 2010 and 2011 for customers to sell gold anonymously to the Tony Goetz refinery in Antwerp for cash, creating the basis for black-market trade.

    The refinery registered gold traders as private customers and split large purchases to circumvent limits on cash transactions, and accepted metal taken by armed robbers in the Antwerp gold quarter, it said.

This ruling also increased the focus on Alain Goetz, one of the brothers who established a refinery in Uganda that officials in Uganda were investigating for accepting gold from Venezuela that may have been smuggled. The refinery denies wrongdoing. 

    Tony Goetz paid more than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in cash for gold during 2010 and 2011 and created around 9.2 million euros in illegal capital gains, the ruling, issued on Jan. 30, said.

In his defense submitted to court in Antwerp Alain Goetz said he had resigned as a director and sold his shares around 2014. He also said he had stepped down from management and sold his shares in the Ugandan refinery. The question is; to whom did he sell the shares? 

In March last year, Ugandan authorities said on they were investigating the country's biggest gold refinery AGR over imports of an estimated 7.4 tonnes of gold, worth $300 million.

The NewVision reported the gold could have originated from Venezuela, which had been selling gold to prop up its struggling, sanctions-hit economy.

African Gold Refinery (AGR) said that the gold came from South America but gave no further details and rejected allegations of smuggling.

Fred Enanga, a spokesman for Uganda's police, said intelligence reports indicated that AGR received a shipment of 3.8 tonnes on March 2, and then another shipment of 3.6 tonnes on March 4. Neither shipment passed through official customs entry points, he said.

Then, on March 7, police raided the premises of AGR after securing a court order and found the 3.6-tonne batch but the first shipment had disappeared, he said.

Uganda has over the years evolved as a regional gold smuggling and trading hub, with dealers exploiting its proximity to Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces tonnes of gold but has been plagued by decades of conflict and mismanagement.

Rampant corruption, lax rules and weak enforcement mean smugglers face few hurdles as they ship or trade the lucrative metal through Uganda, analysts say.

Interviews conducted on connected people bring to the fore sticky issues among, which include the allegation that Goetz has refined illegally-smuggled conflict gold from eastern Congo at AGR in Uganda and exported it through a series of companies to the United States and Europe.

Given the geo-political implications in the volatile Great Lakes, Uganda should be worried about giving sanctuary to an investor who is dealing in conflict minerals from the DRC.

In 1999, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) slapped a $10 billion (Shs37 trillion) penalty on Uganda for plundering minerals from eastern DRC and committing crimes against humanity during the protracted conflict in the late 1990s. Uganda is yet to pay this debt. 

The UN group of experts reveals that Uganda is also the main transit hub for gold smuggled out of Congo. Two major gold smugglers in Congo confirmed to The Sentry that they illegally trafficked gold from eastern Congo to AGR and other regional gold traders backed these accounts.

The Sentry revealed that four regional traders mentioned gold traffickers, Buganda Bagalwa and Mange Namuhanda, who have been named in several U.N. Group of Experts reports on Congo as purchasers of conflict gold, supplied gold to AGR in 2017.

AGR in its response specifically denies having received gold from Bagalwa or Namuhanda. It also rejects allegations that it received significant amounts of undocumented gold from other sources.

These claims are noncompliant with both international supply chain due diligence guidance and international anti-money laundering safeguards because the network's companies buy, refine, and then sell the gold.

In Uganda, AGR has been handed a tax waiver, which was not approved by Parliament.

On the heels of AGR's opening in 2014, Uganda increased its gold exports by a staggering 85,000 per cent, going from exporting a paltry $443,000 (Shs1.6 billion) worth of gold in 2014 to an estimated $377 million(Shs1.4 trillion) in 2017.

Goetz resigned from the position of CEO not long after The Sentry report was released, and has since been replaced by Alphonse Katarebe. 

In September this year i posted an article from the middle east which showed that General Dhalan Al Hamad, a member of the Qatari royal family, used Ugandan gold to finance the weapons trade to the Hezbollah militia. The payment to the Serbian firms was routed via Cyprus in the form of gold provided by Uganda's precious metal dealers AGR. 

Now back to the road construction, African Gold Refinery (AGR) in Uganda, the largest refinery in sub-Saharan Africa, whose owners are now unknown, most of the material this factory uses to produce their gold bars comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the vast majority of mining activity is illegal and serves as a financing source for the purchase of arms.

Un confirmed reports indicate that Alphonse Katarebe was long overthrown from the company with threats of espionage for Rwanda and fled the country then the company was taken over by one person connected to the first family who is now influencing the urgent construction of roads in Congo to allow fast connections in gold smuggling.

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