The elements of power, p.29
The Elements of Power, page 29
At the time of the TFM sale, Freeport officials were insistent on clinging to control of the Grasberg. “The Grasberg made Freeport,” Sanderson said. But Freeport’s flagship mine was also a risky asset: Under Joko Widodo, the Indonesians were looking to gain more national benefits from mining. The Indonesian government changed the law in order to expropriate the mine. “From a political perspective, it was crystal clear,” Sanderson said. “Freeport was going to lose operational control.”
Two years later, one of Indonesia’s state-run mining firms took 51 percent of the Grasberg. Sanderson said the sale had been forced in the way she predicted: “Freeport allowed that to happen through its own arrogance.”
Chapter 39
Tying Up the Supply
The Kamoto Treatment Center, Kolwezi, 2022
At the door to one of the four control rooms at the heart of the Kamoto Treatment Center (KTC) hung a notice, printed on a piece of A4 paper: “Safety: What am I going to do? What can go wrong? What am I going to do about it?” The room was sliced from a concrete octagon that occupied the heart of the treatment plant. On beige walls, computer screens displayed flowcharts, beaming messages at men who sat behind desks, monitoring them all day.
One morning in March 2022, I stood with Yannick Makola, the general director of operations and technology at Glencore’s Kamoto Copper Company mine, or KCC, on the eastern fringe of Kolwezi. He explained how the treatment plant worked. “Everything that happens in the concentrator is managed from here,” Makola said. Outside, seven huge mills rumbled away inside a structure that can only be described as a shed, though one that had been magnified to many times its normal size. “The control room operators are in contact with the people who work on the site to modify and regulate the parameters, making sure that the parameters are the same as the parameters in our procedures.”
Parameters, procedures: It was a world away from the artisanal mines at Kasulo or the open pits of Tenke Fungurume. Safety in all things—even just by staying within the crosswalk on an empty road in front of headquarters—was essential, because as a stone memorial beneath the shade of a giant conifer tree at the entrance to the mine’s offices reminded visitors, mistakes could cost lives. The memorial, dedicated to “our employees who passed away on duty,” was engraved with ten names and ten crosses and carried the inscription Kcc Will Never Forget You.
Just look at what we have built down in Congo. That had been the refrain of several Glencore employees and former employees. Glencore was, at the time I visited, the world’s largest producer of cobalt, which it refined into hydroxide at the KTC plant. The company was keen on showing me the site. Its books were open, and it had nothing to hide. It insisted that the site was an example of mining better and, in terms of environmental and labor practices, could serve as an example for future investments in Congo.
I was shown the massive Mashamba pit and the entrance to the giant Kamoto tunnels; I was given an explainer on how to cut back into the earth in giant steps, following a diagonal body of copper-and-cobalt-rich rock; I was taken to the KTC processing plant; I saw the electrolytic creation of copper sheets and the leaching of cobalt ore using sulfuric acid.
Francis Banze, a metallurgical superintendent and KCC’s cobalt manager, gave me the most detailed explanation I had ever received on how heterogenite ore is broken up, milled into powder, mixed with water, floated, concentrated with acid, roasted, lixiviated, separated, then filtered and dried into a blue hydroxide cake that is ready to be shipped through Zambia to Durban or Dar es Salaam, and then to China.
At the end of my tour, Clint Donkin welcomed me into his office at the site. Donkin, a soft-spoken Australian in steel-toed shoes, was the CEO of KCC. He explained that he wished more people would visit and tell the world what they had seen at KCC. “The more people who come here, the more people will understand it,” he told me. “This is like any mine site I’ve been on in North or South America.”
Donkin described how, as he saw it, KCC was paying its dues. Collectively, he explained, Glencore paid “five hundred million dollars in taxes and royalties to the Congolese state, annually.” These amounts fluctuate with the price of commodities; in 2022, Glencore would in fact pay a total of $1.14 billion in taxes and royalties to Congo’s government, almost half of the $2.3 billion it paid between 2021 and 2023. These are significant proportions of the company’s earnings. Glencore doesn’t publish the revenue or earnings figures at individual mines, but in 2023, for example, the firm mined about $2.23 billion of copper and cobalt at their Kamoto operation. And the benefits to having KCC in the country didn’t stop there, Donkin continued. The mining company frequently contributed to charity: Just recently, Donkin told me, it had donated $1 million to local medical needs, and it also took care of its employees’ medical costs.
KCC brought technology and leadership skills to its employees, Donkin said, training up a new generation of Congolese who would be able to generate wealth for their country. The plethora of Congolese employees—engineers and technicians, drivers and managers—seemed to confirm that, even though a November report by Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), an NGO based in the U.K., and the Centre d’Aide Juridico-Judiciaire, a Congolese legal-aid center specializing in labor rights, criticized Glencore’s use of workers hired through subcontractors whose contracts were less secure and provided for fewer benefits than if the workers were full-time employees. Glencore did use subcontractors, albeit much less than at other companies. In 2020, at TFM, for example, a whopping 68 percent of the workforce was subcontracted, whereas only 44 percent of Glencore’s workforce was hired through such subcontractors.
Environmentally, Donkin said, KCC was more up to scratch than its competitors and also under constant assessment. The mine operates what is known as a “closed loop”: Water is recycled and toxic waste carefully managed. There were still accidents, however. In 2021, for instance, KCC maintenance engineers mistakenly released acid into a nearby river. (Glencore quickly admitted to the spill and said, “Our community officers have not registered any complaints nor concerns from their engagement with the surrounding communities.”) And in 2024, a report by RAID and AFREWATCH indicated that the firm was contributing to water pollution in the area. In response, Glencore stated that while its mining assets “make a contribution to society, they may also have adverse social and environmental impacts.”
Glencore was often accused of buying artisanal cobalt, but company officials I spoke to vigorously disputed this claim. Look at the size of our mine, they said. Look at the amount of equipment we have. Why would we risk it to buy hand-mined cobalt? It was a compelling argument, and there is no evidence to the contrary.
“This is a world-class asset, and we treat it like that,” Donkin proudly told me. “It’s easy to lob grenades over the fence. But we want to be part of the solution.”
* * *
Glencore had been a target of criticism since it first began operating in Congo, starting with the purchase of shares in Nikanor in 2007 and when Glencore gained control over the KCC mine through the merger and share purchases of 2008 and 2009. Glencore officials have always maintained that the company acquired the mining interests entirely legally: The acquisitions were purchases of public companies registered in the U.K. and Canada. In the case of Nikanor, for instance, the firm was listed on the London Stock Exchange, and Katanga Mining’s shares could be bought in Toronto.
The aura of disrepute that Gertler had cultivated through his dubious dealings with Kabila and Katumba, however, attached itself to Glencore. NGOs like Global Witness have said that compliance departments should have raised genuine concerns about working with Gertler, and an investigation by the Swiss government noted that the company “failed to ensure adequate management” of the bribery risks presented by Gertler’s purchase of minority stakes from Gécamines for less than their value.
Another criticism leveled against Glencore was that it had given the Israeli businessman a series of loans and “entered loss-making deals with him from 2007 to 2010.” The loans, the company would later insist, were not low-interest, and were driven by financial motives as well as the desire to do business with Gertler: They were set between 3 and 7 percent over the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR), which sometimes pushed them into double-digit territory. These were hardly low-interest loans, the firm argued. “Glencore has made loans to companies associated with Mr Gertler at various times, fully secured on shares and at commercial rates of interest,” the company insisted in a letter to Global Witness in 2012. Glencore went public in 2011, and the company began to renew its focus on compliance after it listed its shares on the London Stock Exchange.
Even so, Global Witness kept up pressure on the company with a series of reports detailing how Glencore and Gertler had outmaneuvered other investors—including Forrest (through a process dubbed “de-Forrestation”)—to control the mines. The NGO accused Glencore of “paying the gatekeeper” by way of deals that were “nuanced and convoluted. They involve intricate financial arrangements and secret transactions through offshore companies.” The outcome, Global Witness wrote, was that “the mining giant gets its assets and the gatekeeper’s interests are taken care of.” The gatekeeper, of course, was Gertler.
Former Glencore officials with whom I spoke claimed that the image of its cozy partnership with Gertler is overblown. Several described the relationship as anything but cordial. Gertler had even hounded Glencore when he didn’t get his way, threatening to sue. In February 2017, in a transaction that involved Glencore paying Gertler-associated companies more than half a billion dollars, the firm bought Gertler out of KCC and Mutanda. It acquired Gertler’s remaining stock in Mutanda for $922 million and in Katanga Mining for $38 million, offset against a series of loans worth over half a billion U.S. dollars.
But Gertler wouldn’t just go away. Glencore was also obliged to pay Gertler under Congolese law, because two firms he controlled had bought Gécamines’s royalty streams from the Glencore-owned mines.
* * *
On December 21, 2017, Gertler was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for amassing a fortune “through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The Israeli businessman had weathered bad press, but the sanctions made him radioactive: Anyone who dealt with him now ran the substantial risk of running afoul of U.S. law, a death knell for a large multinational like Glencore.
Because Gertler’s mining royalties were paid out in U.S. dollars, Glencore executives feared their company might be targeted by the federal justice system. Glencore initially stopped paying the royalties—estimated to be around $77,000 a day, or $28 million in 2018—that Gertler was entitled to under Congolese law. (The royalties were paid on monthly and quarterly bases.) Gertler began to put pressure on Glencore and initiated legal proceedings, claiming almost $3 billion in past and future royalties. Glencore officials worried that the company could lose the mine in Congo. “And the Chinese would be there, just waiting to snap it up,” one Glencore official told me.
In early 2018, Glencore sent a team of negotiators to Washington. They explained that Chinese enterprises and the Chinese state had been buying up copper-and-cobalt mines all over southern Congo, and that if Glencore were to stop paying Gertler, it would lose the mine. With TFM sold to China Molybdenum, Glencore was the last non-Chinese or non-Kazakh major owner of copper-cobalt mines in the greater Katanga region. That year, Glencore’s mined output was 42,200 tons of cobalt—the largest share of any one company globally and around 28 percent of total global production. Did the Trump administration want all that to go to the Chinese?
Glencore’s lawyers had devised a solution, and they wanted to know if the U.S. government would object. As a company based in Switzerland, not subject to U.S. oversight, could they pay Gertler in a non-U.S.-dollar currency, such as euros?
No objection was raised.
By the end of the 2010s, the fear of China taking over the production of battery metals like cobalt had firmly lodged itself in people’s minds; it provided a powerful counternarrative to concerns about corruption. Time and again, mining executives complained to me that businesses from the U.S. and Europe have to contend with anticorruption legislation. Such laws also exist in China, but they seem to be applied only very sparingly to Chinese firms working overseas, especially in places like Congo. What’s more, well-publicized concerns about artisanal mining strengthened the case for those running industrial mines, such as KCC.
In June 2018, Glencore, in conjunction with Katanga Mining Limited, publicly announced that their companies, in order to “avoid the material risk of seizure of its assets under DRC court orders” would “pay the relevant royalties as and when they become due to Ventora [a Gertler-controlled firm] in non-U.S. dollars, without involving U.S. persons, in order to discharge their obligations under the terms of the pre-existing contracts.”
The same day Glencore released this statement, Global Witness’s Peter Jonas blasted the arrangement, saying that Glencore was effectively acting with impunity and that paying Gertler in non-U.S. dollars was “not an acceptable solution to this dispute.” He went on: “U.S. authorities must hold Glencore accountable when those payments to Gertler resume.”
But when regular payments resumed, U.S. authorities remained silent.
* * *
By 2024, Glencore had been investigated by the Congolese government, the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland, and the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service. It had paid more than $1.5 billion in aggregate fines and had admitted to doling out hundreds of millions in bribes. (Most of the allegations did not focus on the firm’s operations in Congo, but rather its oil business in West Africa.) “Bribery was accepted as part of the West Africa desk’s way of doing business,” a British judge said of one of Glencore’s offices in London. “Bribery is a highly corrosive offence. It quite literally corrupts people and companies, and spreads like a disease.”
In May 2022, on the day it was announced that Glencore was being fined $1.1 billion by the U.S. Justice Department and being compelled to install monitors with wide powers of oversight to look for malfeasance, I was at a conference with officials from the company. They seemed unperturbed. They would pay, they said. The company’s stock price hardly budged. The market appeared to share the company-wide conviction that it had evolved from the days of deals that were likely to place it in hot water. That year, Glencore’s annual revenue was $256 billion.
The firm was released from its monitorship in March 2025, a year earlier than initially agreed upon, with the U.S. government arguing that it was “no longer necessary” to have them present.
But Congo, which Glencore paid $180 million in 2022 to settle disputes, appears to still be trying to negotiate higher taxes. Ronny Jackson, the Republican congressman who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, met with Glencore officials also in March 2025, shortly after visiting Congo. He told congressmen that he witnessed “shocking” levels of corruption and noted that Congo’s government had recently tried to charge Glencore $80 billion in taxes. (The figure was apparently inflated.) “This kind of corruption,” Jackson noted, “discourages legitimate businesses from investing.”
As ever, the Chinese were not discouraged by this state of affairs. During the first years of the 2020s, mining executives such as Glencore’s Ivan Glasenberg continued to point to Chinese firms’ control of the world’s cobalt supply and their domination of the production of lithium-ion batteries. That China Molybdenum had managed to acquire TFM—and hold on to it—illustrated to them perfectly how Beijing has managed to capitalize on the Congolese mining environment to take charge of the supply chain for battery metals. “China Inc. has realized how important cobalt is,” Glasenberg, then CEO of Glencore, said in 2021 at a Financial Times conference on the future of the car. “They’ve gone and tied up the supply.” (That’s not to say Glencore wasn’t selling to the Chinese, U.S. officials were quick to point out to me.)
Glasenberg, who would soon step down from the helm of Glencore, spoke on video chat from a conference room in the depths of the company’s gunmetal-gray headquarters in the town of Baar. Up until that point, only a few companies had woken up to China’s ascendency in the critical-metals supply chain. “The gap is growing every day, and Chinese dominance is growing every day,” Brian Menell, the CEO of TechMet, a firm that invests in projects across the critical-metals supply chain, told me. “If Tesla reaches the goal of twenty million electric vehicles by 2030”—a goal that even Elon Musk himself would back down from—“that is two times the world’s current supply of lithium. Where’s that going to come from?”
Tesla had already been thinking about where its supply was originating. Musk’s company had begun to look into developing alternative supply chains, and it had started early, in the mid-2010s. “There were definitely concerns and discussions about the availability of metals,” said Andrew Stevenson, who worked in Tesla’s division for special projects from 2015 to 2018. “Elon’s the only one who understands this,” a Glencore official said when we spoke in 2021. He explained that Tesla had innovated early by buying cobalt for the long term in so-called offtake agreements, which up until that point had mainly been used by Chinese battery firms and cobalt-processing companies.
