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Fourteen major mining companies in DR Congo paid at least $20 billion to ineligible subcontractors between 2020 and 2025, the country’s subcontracting regulator told Semafor, citing recently completed checks.
These findings at mining businesses, among them subsidiaries of Swiss commodities giant Glencore, Ivanhoe Mines and Chinese-Congolese joint-venture Sicomines, have prompted the regulator to plan tougher inspections this month to tackle breaches of subcontracting rules. These include the longstanding use of Congolese figureheads to disguise foreign control.
Glencore declined to comment. Ivanhoe Mines and Sicomines did not respond to Semafor’s requests for comment by publication time.
The regulator’s move comes as the country courts new mining investment, including from the US, and seeks to ensure that Congolese partners genuinely own and help run the businesses supplying its mines, in line with its laws.
“We are open to partnership. But we don’t want people to come just for an extractive economy and leave us with holes,” Juan Ted Beleshayi, head of the Authority for the Regulation of Subcontracting in the Private Sector, told Semafor.
In recent weeks, he has ordered miners to terminate about 1,800 subcontracts with suppliers lacking valid registration certificates. These include contracts with 1,540 suppliers at two subsidiaries of Glencore, alongside those involving Ivanhoe Mines, Eurasian Resources Group and Sicomines. “We really only carried out a simple check,” said Beleshayi, who took charge of the agency just over three months ago. He said he had completed checks begun under his predecessor.
This month’s inspections would be “very detailed and rigorous,” said Beleshayi. Inspectors will check who owns the suppliers on paper, who calls the shots and who controls the bank accounts. Companies who fail to comply with the regulator’s decisions could face closure, he said.
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Subcontracting represents billions of dollars to the Congolese economy — in 2025, 167 major companies declared $3.7 billion in contracts. The regulatory agency registers mining suppliers, which typically handle transport, machinery maintenance and construction among other work, and enforces rules based on a 2017 law that requires Congolese investors to own at least 51% of those businesses, with foreign ownership capped at 49%.
Chinese companies dominate DR Congo’s copper and cobalt mines and have often faced criticism from the regulator for shutting Congolese businesses out of subcontracting work. Beleshayi’s predecessor, Miguel Kashal, accused Sicomines, in 2023 of keeping all its subcontracts in Chinese hands. Three years ago, Sicomines pledged to give Congolese suppliers its secondary work. A company representative said that a misunderstanding over subcontracting rules had been resolved.
Beleshayi told Semafor his own inspections had found the same pattern. Sicomines did not respond to this claim. “We’re not saying foreigners have to leave. We just want a 49-51 split,” Beleshayi said. Limited financing and technical skills prevent Congolese suppliers from handling major mining contracts, researcher Fridolin Kimonge told Semafor.
Ownership checks and contract cancellations alone cannot address those weaknesses. “It is not enough to cancel; there has to be a plan behind it,” Beleshayi said. Temporary exemptions would allow foreign suppliers to help Congolese businesses become partners or competitors, he said. “We will look for Congolese who understand American culture or can adapt to it, to build companies together,” he said of incoming US companies.
Ruben’s view
Like many African countries, DR Congo struggles to enforce laws that exist on paper. Part of the problem with its subcontracting law is finding replacements for the suppliers who break it. Congolese businesses often lack the financing and technical skills to take over major mining contracts, limiting how far the regulator can act without disrupting operations.
Washington’s push to loosen China’s grip on Congolese minerals could give the regulator more options. Beleshayi expects American suppliers to accompany new US mining investments and form businesses with Congolese partners. If those companies can deliver the work and meet the ownership rules, existing suppliers would face competitors capable of replacing them. “Yes, absolutely,” he said when I asked whether that prospect could pressure companies already operating in DR Congo to comply.
Conflict in mining regions, disputed licenses, slow permitting, and unpredictable enforcement have long deterred Western investors, while Chinese operators have been better able to absorb those risks. DR Congo’s recent reforms and Beleshayi’s crackdown could help signal to the US and European companies it is courting that the country is becoming a more reliable place to do business.
Room for Disagreement
Transparency has long been a central demand in efforts to improve DR Congo’s mining governance and local ownership alone offers no guarantee that contracts benefit ordinary Congolese, say critics.
In a 2020 study of six mining companies, researcher Kimonge found that DR Congo’s subcontracting law required majority Congolese ownership but provided no mechanism to trace where the money invested in those businesses came from. He warned that gaps in the rules also allowed political and administrative officials to own suppliers and steer contracts toward their own businesses. “The situation has not improved much,” he told Semafor.
Mining governance analyst Jean Pierre Okenda called repeated denunciations of figureheads as “populist rhetoric” that does not go far enough and urged the regulator to publish suppliers’ real owners and their ties to officials. Otherwise, he warned, replacement contracts could go to another set of politically connected businesses.
Notable
- DR Congo has launched a geological survey aimed at improving knowledge of its vast mineral reserves to reduce exploration risk and attract investment into underexplored regions.