President Kabila hailed the SICOMINES agreement as the “deal of the century” and moved quickly to profit from it. Kabila established a private firm called Strategic Projects and Investments (SPI), which received money from a range of Chinese projects, including the tolls paid by trucks that crossed the border at Kipushi after the new road was built. An investigation by Bloomberg revealed that SPI collected tolls of $302 million between 2010 and 2020, and that this was just one of the many Chinese deals through which Kabila and his family profited.
