Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

Aristote argued that the Mining Code in 2002 was forced on the DRC by the World Bank in exchange for much-needed loans. The country was reeling from years of war and violence dating back to the Rwandan genocide and was in desperate need of financial support. Aristote contended that the World Bank offered its support primarily with the ambition of opening the DRC’s mining concessions to its stakeholders so that they could get rich. Once the foreign mining companies got a foothold in the country, Aristote suggested that they used questionable practices to cheat the Congolese government on tax payments. As an example, he said that mining companies claimed higher capital expenditures and operating expenses than they originally projected in their feasibility studies. Based on these elevated expenses, the mining companies then asserted that they had not made any profit and therefore did not need to pay taxes or dividends to Gécamines.