Oil giant Perenco’s suspicious deals with companies close to Congo’s

Congolese businessman Nicolas Wan likes to post pictures on social media of Mateba, a lush island the size of Paris, nestled where the Congo River meets the Atlantic Ocean. In one photo from April 2020, the young man contemplates the tranquil waters turned orange by a glowing sun. “My favourite place on earth”, reads the caption written by the son of Alain Wan, a construction tycoon linked to several alleged embezzlement scandals involving Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The Wans once owned Mateba but sold it to Kabila in 2010. Since then, it has become a personal playground for the man who ruled DRC for almost two decades until 2019 and built a fortune worth hundreds of millions of euros. In 2017, it was revealed how Kabila had 450 zebras, buffaloes, giraffes and other wild animals shipped from Namibia to the island, with the help of Alain Wan.

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But Mateba isn’t just home to exotic wildlife, it has also been the registered address of a mysterious company incorporated by the Wan family: Etablissement Kuntuala (ETS Kuntuala). This firm shares a bank account with another opaque entity, Kuntuala Mining SAS. The first transfer the account ever received, according to internal bank documents, came from the Franco-British oil company Perenco in February 2015, for a total of $272,914.

Investigate Europe and Mediapart have uncovered 14 money transfers made by Perenco’s Congolese subsidiaries between 2014 and 2015 to firms close to Joseph Kabila. The transactions, totalling $1.3 million, were listed in a treasure trove of financial records leaked from pan-African bank BGFI. Obtained by Mediapart and the NGO Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and published in November 2021, the “Congo Hold-up” documents exposed how Kabila and his associates allegedly misappropriated millions of euros of public funds. It sparked police investigations in Congo, France and Belgium.

In a statement, Perenco denied any wrongdoing and said that no payments were made to ETS Kuntuala. BGFI did not respond to requests for comment.

The revelations concerning Perenco, published here for the first time, put renewed scrutiny on Europe’s largest independent oil producer, already mired in allegations of wrongdoing in DRC and across Africa. In November 2022, Investigate Europe and partner revealed 167 reports of pollution linked to the company, which is Congo’s only oil producer (NGOs Sherpa and Friends of the Earth later filed a complaint against Perenco in France for environmental damage). In March 2023, it emerged that French police are investigating Perenco for corruption in several unspecified African countries.

DRC remains one of the world’s five poorest nations, yet it has become a land of plenty for Perenco since it bought ageing oil fields on and off the country’s coast in the early 2000s. For its offshore permits alone, the group declared revenues of $196 million in 2021, according to corporate documents filed in Guernsey, a tax haven where some of its holdings are registered. 

In the Congo Hold-up leak, Perenco doesn’t appear as a client of BGFI, whose Congolese subsidiary until 2018 was run by Joseph Kabila’s adoptive brother. However, Perenco’s name pops up in the accounts of other BGFI clients who received money from the oil company. Among them is the recipient of the $272,914 transfer, ETS Kuntuala, a company controlled by Alain Wan and his mother, according to a leaked bank document from 2016.

The links between the Wans and the former Congolese president have been well documented. Alain Wan, the patriarch of the family business, is one of Kabila’s closest associates. With his childhood friend, Marc Piedboeuf, Wan incorporated a myriad of companies in DRC and in several tax havens, some of which have carried out operations worth tens of millions of dollars for the benefit of the Kabilas, according to reports. 

Wan and Piedboeuf set up Grands Elevages du Bas-Congo (GEL), the company that owns Mateba Island and which was bought by the President via his personal holding company (Piedboeuf appeared as a director there as early as 2014). The pair also created Port de Fisher, sold to Kabila at the end of 2015. They were also shareholders and directors of EGAL, a firm at the heart of an alleged embezzlement scam of $43 million revealed in 2016 by Jean-Jacques Lumumba, a former BGFI employee turned whistleblower.

ETS Kuntuala’s registration on Mateba and the ties between Alain Wan and Kabila could have been red…