Mine. Mine. Mine. How One Corrupt Billionaire Kicked Off the Global Cobalt Spree

O​​n a freezing morning last December, President Donald J. Trump welcomed two African leaders to Washington, DC. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo were there to sign a peace deal. Rwanda and Congo have been involved in a series of conflicts in which more people died than any since the Second World War, and the two men warily avoided looking at each other as they agreed to a nonaggression pact that Trump gleefully hailed. Kagame, a wiry, athletic man whose hollow eyes always seemed to be fixated on some point in the distance, and Tshisekedi, younger but slower and fond of wearing outrageously expensive watches, had made no secret of their dislike: “I know leaders when I see them. I also know idiots,” Kagame once said, referring to his Congolese counterpart. For his part, Tshisekedi had compared Kagame to Hitler in the past and threatened an assault on Rwanda’s capital.

But Trump had brought them together at the Institute of Peace that he’d recently renamed after himself. And undergirding the diplomatic theatrics was a stark truth: The United States badly needed critical metals, like cobalt, that can be found in huge quantities in Congo. Brokering peace with Congo’s bitter enemy—Rwanda—could be the key to securing them.

For the last decade or so, a global resource war has been working its way to a fever pitch. Beijing and Washington are locked in a fight over how the future will be powered, and Congo is one of the prizes in this new Great Game. It is endowed with some of the richest mineral supplies on earth, including some 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, as well as huge reserves of copper and a Mendeleevian constellation of other metals. China has long held sway in Congo, and despite Trump’s vows to break the country’s stranglehold globally, Beijing still controls most of the mining, refining, and production of critical metals that are used in electronics, lithium-ion batteries, and electric cars, and are expected to power the future of green-energy efforts around the world. China—to use the language of competition that Trump favors—is winning. But on December 4 the US inked a deal to create a Congo-based reserve that appeared to turn the tables on Beijing. As Trump put it, “We’re sending some of our biggest and greatest US companies over. Everybody’s going to make a lot of money.”

At the peace talks event, Trump hailed an end to the bloodshed, calling the deal “a new framework for economic prosperity.” But Congo has long been part of a frustrating region for would-be peacemakers and profiteers. In Washington, lobbyists have been arguing that there are other ways to secure the necessary resources for the US. There is the Venezuela option—removing leaders and using military force to pry open access to critical resources like oil. And there’s working with people who are not exactly palatable, but who have significant sway in the region—like Dan Gertler, a billionaire Israeli businessman whose name has long been a byword for shady deals in Congo.

In 2017 the Department of the Treasury said Gertler used a network of corruption in one of the world’s poorest countries to enrich himself. His mining deals in Congo, NGOs alleged, relied on schemes like kickbacks and backhanders. (Gertler declined repeated requests for an interview; he has always publicly denied allegations of wrongdoing in Congo or in any other country.) That same year, Trump mandated a federal strategy to identify the materials that were essential for US industry and growth, and now, nearly a decade later, as one US legal adviser puts it, “People think that you need someone like Gertler in there, to counter the Chinese.”

Some US diplomats and lobbyists are now quietly been pushing the Trump administration to nix sanctions on Gertler. And as such are grappling with the complex history of figures like him, whose lust for profit is matched only by a prescient sense of what the world will need next to satiate the ravenous maw of industry and global capital.

Gertler claims to have fallen in love with Congo while smoke was still rising over Kinshasa. In 1997, as the country’s capital city fell to a rebel army, a 23-year-old Gertler saw an opportunity, one that would accrue to those who got in early. The country’s longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had been overthrown, and a new order was being shaped under the rebel ­leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

At first Gertler was focused on diamonds. They were part of his inheritance, after all: His grandfather Moshe Schnitzer had been one of the founders of the Israel Diamond Exchange, and he was known as Mr. Diamond. Schnitzer was also closely connected to Israel’s political and intelligence elite.

The young Gertler decided to strike out on his own to see whether he could make some diamond deals away from the family business. After completing his Israeli military service, he decided to travel to Africa, where the overwhelming majority of the world’s diamonds came from. He started buying rough stones in Angola and Liberia, but his ambitions were larger: The young Gertler wanted to control the supply chain, cutting out middlemen and miners and keeping more of the profits.

A childhood friend of Gertler’s once told journalists that the young Israeli had a “particular” understanding of the world: “When he looks at a wooden chair, he ponders not only how it was made, but from which forest it came, and what infrastructure made it possible to exploit the forest.”

In Congo, such a way of looking at the world would be essential. Gertler understood immediately that Congo’s future was one in which well-connected insiders could make huge profits from the country’s gigantic stockpile of natural resources, so he sought to make connections that would prove vital. Upon arriving in the capital, Gertler enlisted the help of Kinshasa’s chief Chabad rabbi to make the introduction to Kabila’s 25-year-old son, Joseph, and the two hit it off immediately.

Gertler and Joseph Kabila were separated by only two years, and both men carried the burden of their family legacies. Joseph, taciturn, with an angular face and the shadow of a mustache, was a commander in his father’s military. They became, in the businessman’s later telling, “like brothers: We talked about life, religion, the development of the country.” They did not know it at the time, but their conversations contained within them the framework for a critical-metals dilemma that, 20 years later, has come to preoccupy our world.

By 1998 the elder Kabila wanted to establish a diamond monopoly to make more tax revenue. Joseph, who had been promoted to deputy chief of staff for the army, knew just the man: the young Israeli who had taken to spending most of his time in Congo. Gertler had begun meeting with ministers in Kinshasa and telling them that he wanted to do $2 billion in diamond deals over the next two years. But he was still looking for the venture that would justify his big African gamble.

Joseph arranged a meeting at which his father asked for $20 million up front in exchange for a diamond monopoly. Gertler returned to Israel to celebrate. Twenty million dollars was a minute sum compared with the profit he could expect to make. Two days after his meeting with the president, however, he received a call from one of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s associates: Perhaps he hadn’t understood. The president needed the money immediately. The young Gertler liquidated stock and turned to banks and his family for the cash. His grandfather personally guaranteed a loan from the Bank of Israel. The money was wired to the Swiss account of Congo’s central bank.

At first it seemed as if Gertler’s gamble had paid off. At the end of July, his company signed a deal worth up to $700 million that gave it control over the entirety of Congo’s diamond output for 18 months. He was only 26 years old. A UN report would later call the deal one of several “miscalculated decisions” by Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

When he was putting the diamond deal together, Kabila was fighting a war against Rwanda and Uganda. He wasn’t just looking for money; he was also casting about for military support wherever he could find it. Gertler had apparently promised Israeli military training and support, leaning on the close contacts between his family and his nation’s defense and intelligence apparatus.

According to the United Nations, the diamond deal between Kabila and Gertler contained unpublished clauses in which IDI—Gertler’s firm—“agreed to arrange, through its connections with high-ranking Israeli military officers, the delivery of undisclosed quantities of arms as well as training for the Congolese armed forces.” The report alleged that diamonds were then flown to Tel Aviv by former Israeli Air Force pilots.

“We knew for a fact that there were times that the Israeli military was trolling around down in Mbuji-Mayi,” Melissa Sanderson, a political officer and chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Kinshasa during the 2000s, told me, referring to Congo’s diamond capital. “And we knew he [Gertler] got them there.” Gertler apparently had close contacts with the Mossad, Israel’s secret service. In 2019 it was reported by Haaretz and Bloomberg that Yossi Cohen, then head of the Mossad, had traveled to Congo with Gertler at least three times to lobby the president. (Gertler has “lots of relationships in the region that are important to Israel’s interests,” Israel’s former ambassador to Washington told Bloomberg in 2021.)

Gertler has always denied allegations of being involved in military aid. In a 2002 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, he made light of the allegations, sarcastically agreeing that he had “put together a consortium involving the FBI, the CIA, the Russian secret service, and the Israeli police, army, and foreign ministry, adding that he controls the last three.”

Gertler’s diamond deal had attracted scrutiny from the International Monetary Fund and other international actors. The UN report called the deal a “nightmare” for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a disaster for the local diamond trade. Gertler’s firm was accused of cherry-picking the best diamonds, and the stones he did not buy turbocharged a smuggling boom that decimated the industry. What’s more, Gertler kept some 70 percent of the profits from the venture, according to the BBC. Little benefit accrued to the country.

On January 16, 2001, Laurent-Désiré Kabila was killed, reportedly by one of the child soldiers who had been assigned to guard him. Joseph Kabila ascended to become the fourth president of Congo at just 29 years old. By April, Kabila’s new government was persuaded by the IMF and the World Bank to withdraw from the contract with Gertler after only eight months. At first Gertler was livid: How could his friend have double-crossed him? He called Kabila over and over but got no response. He threatened legal action.

Kabila’s new administration convinced Gertler to cool down. They saw Gertler as an “important asset to use,” Sanderson told me, because of his “connections to the Israeli government and, most especially, to the Israeli military.”

Kabila appointed Gertler special envoy, and the young Israeli began traveling to the US on the president’s behalf. He was instrumental in brokering a 2003 peace deal between Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. At the time, a senior Bush administration official told Bloomberg she found Gertler to be “serious and credible.”

Those diplomatic efforts to aid Congo were not simply motivated by altruism. They allowed Gertler to curry favor while he was looking for his next opportunity, especially with an influential minister named Augustin Katumba Mwanke, whom many believed was the power behind Kabila’s throne. By April 2003 Gertler was back buying diamonds, with a convoluted deal to purchase cut-rate stones that the country’s mining minister called “a terrible contract for the republic.” But Katumba was also opening doors for Gertler in Congo’s fabulously rich southern province of Katanga, where fortunes were being made mining copper and cobalt.

It was one of those coincidences of history. Just as more and more lithium-ion batteries were used in devices, the mines had come roaring back to life. In 2002, with the assistance of the World Bank, Congo instituted its first mining code. Katumba and Gertler were soon in business together.

During this time Gertler discovered a talent for luring investors. Even as he and his companies took on loan after loan, becoming, in one businessman’s words, a “debt monster,” he was still able to convince people to place hundreds of millions of dollars with him. He didn’t do it alone. His network included Beny Steinmetz, a businessman who was later convicted of bribery in a Swiss court, and a series of rabbis who explained to potential investors that Gertler had an almost mystical power to yield profits “beyond the natural order.”

Two London-based businessmen, Moises and Mendi Gertner, decided to invest large sums of money because they had been told by an acquaintance that Gertler was a “charismatic child prodigy with extensive and unusual connections, who is capable of making a fortune.” It turned out that the “connections” the acquaintance was talking about included Kabila’s sister Jaynet and Katumba.

“Dan and Katumba have a tremendous relationship,” Mendi Gertner later said during an arbitration resulting from a later disagreement over money. “We knew from the outset that Mr. Katumba was the one helping to make things happen.”

For Gertler, Katumba was more than just a fixer; he was an essential part of the operation. And the Israeli made an effort to become as close to the Congolese minister as possible. “If there is no Katumba, they also take away the [mining] license,” Gertler would later say. Gertler explained during arbitration proceedings how he began to split his companies with Katumba in exchange for the state assets—things like mining licenses and oil rights—that he provided to Gertler. And for his part, Gertler brought in foreign investors to buttress Congo’s cash flow. Katumba’s “split” was then paid out either as a direct cash purchase of his “trust” shares or as a “commission” on the deal of around 15 percent of the company. As Gertler put it, “I think everyone who was in Congo understood that Katumba’s word was law.”

Boosted further by his connection to Katumba, Gertler would often represent himself to outsiders as uniquely powerful, the only person who could get things done in a chaotic country. “He gave the impression of being very important,” Charlotte “Maman Ocean” Cime Jinga, the former mayor of the mining town of Kolwezi, said. “That everyone relied on him to eat from his trough.” During the arbitration with the Gertner brothers, Gertler at one point turned on a lawyer who was questioning him. “My power in Congo is that my word is my bond,” Gertler said. “You don’t know what trouble is…. Do you know what it’s like to deal with a chief who has to support 10,000 families, each with five children, people who are hungry for fufu, the local food there?” Gertler boasted to the lawyer, “I am a king in Congo to this day.”

By the mid-2000s Gertler had amassed enormous power and assets in Congo, and the world’s miners were starting to notice: In July 2006, a mining company founded by Gertler, Nikanor, was floated on the London Stock Exchange. The next year a Swiss company obtained its first shares of Gertler’s company—a commodity trading and mining firm with a culture of making money, it sometimes seemed, at any cost—and ended up taking a 12.5 percent stake. That firm, Glencore, would later pay $700 million after it pleaded guilty in US federal court to a long-running bribery scheme involving foreign officials in seven countries, including Congo. A press release from the Department of Justice confirmed that Glencore admitted to paying “approximately $27.5 million to third parties, while intending for a portion of the payments to be used as bribes.” Gertler was not named in the suit but was long familiar with the ways that these kinds of payments could unlock business opportunities in Congo.

By the early 2010s Gertler was at the zenith of his influence. But his reputation had begun to sour. A London financier who worked with him said, “We all knew he was a scumbag. He was someone who was malevolent.” At one point, the financier went to visit Gertler in his suite at the Ritz in London. “He oozed evil.”

Meanwhile, global demand for cobalt and copper was accelerating as battery-powered devices, like cell phones, became a necessity for modern life, and yet Congo remained poor and conflict-wracked. Many American firms, wary of corruption and instability, decided to stay away from business dealings in the region. During this same period, however, China, which was intensifying its quest to build electric cars to reduce pollution in its cities, jumped at the opportunity to get a handle on the supply chain. Beijing hammered out deals with Kabila to build roads and hospitals in exchange for mining rights.

“Twenty-five years ago we did not look over a horizon to say, ‘China’s going to become an economic power whose interests are not aligned with ours,’ ” Sanderson, the US diplomat, reflected. A lust for cheaper goods, cheaper electronics, had blinded Washington to Beijing’s increasing control throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s. That’s not to say everyone ignored the opportunity to make a buck in one of the world’s poorest countries. Among the deployers of foreign capital eager to invest in the boom years was the giant New York hedge fund Och-Ziff (since rebranded as Sculptor Capital). Years later Och-Ziff, too, would plead guilty to paying bribes in several African countries, including Congo. It was alleged that the hedge fund used a “foreign agent” to funnel at least $25 million to an unnamed Congolese official. That official’s résumé matched Katumba’s, and the agent was a fixer whom the Justice Department described only as an “Israeli businessman” with significant interests in Congo’s copper and diamond mining sectors. Media outlets and NGOs later identified that agent as Gertler (though he was never charged in the case). “The DRC landscape is in the making and I am shaping it—like no one else,” the agent wrote in an email recovered by federal prosecutors.

In 2012 Katumba died in a plane crash. Gertler told people, including his Och-Ziff investors, that he was upset. But others read his mood differently. As one text message between Moises Gertner and another friend put it, upon learning of Katumba’s death: “Our friend is happy he is going to save paying a lot of money,” presumably referencing the payments made from Gertler to Katumba.

And so Gertler, ever searching for opportunity, refocused his efforts on Joseph Kabila. In public, Gertler hailed Kabila’s efforts to run the country. “He’s the most promising new president in the world—a new Mandela,” he told Newsweek. But soon Gertler also began to use the same kind of language to describe himself: “I should get a Nobel Prize,” Gertler told journalists from Bloomberg in 2012. “They need people like us, who come and put billions in the ground. Without this, the resources are worth nothing.”

By this time, Gertler had also attracted the attention of international law enforcement, and investors in Gertler’s businesses were getting nervous. On December 21, 2017, Gertler was sanctioned by the US 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 US law.

In 2018 Glencore stopped paying the royalties—estimated to be around $77,000 a day, or $28 million annually—that Gertler was entitled to under Congolese law. Gertler initiated legal proceedings, claiming almost $3 billion in past and future royalties.

In early 2018 Glencore executives knew they were caught between a rock and a hard place: Chinese enterprises had been buying up copper and cobalt mines all over southern Congo, and if Glencore were to stop paying Gertler, they would all lose their cash cows. “And the Chinese would be there, just waiting to snap it up,” as one Glencore official put it. On the other hand, Glencore executives feared their company might be targeted by the US government because even though the company was based abroad, they were paying Gertler in US dollars. Ultimately, the company sent a team of negotiators to Washington to devise a solution: As a company based in Switzerland, could they pay Gertler in a different currency, such as euros?

No objection was raised, and business with Gertler, the mines, and the implicit blessing of the United States government went on as usual. (It was not as if Gertler was happy about the arrangement. In an interview with the Israeli paper Haaretz, two former auditors at a Congolese bank told journalists that they saw Gertler and his associates on various occasions enter the bank around that time with sacks, suitcases, and a bill counter: Soon afterward they noticed large movements of money in accounts that were supposedly unconnected to Gertler. “That was clearly an attempt to evade the sanctions,” one of them said.)

At the end of the 2010s, it became clear that Beijing had stolen a march on Washington. The US began to wake up to how many of Congo’s resources—especially cobalt—were controlled by the Chinese. President Joe Biden ordered a strategic review of critical metals, and the US moved away from Chinese-produced supply chains for military equipment. But by that point, China dominated in Indonesia, the second largest producer of cobalt and the world’s largest miner of nickel, another battery mineral; and was deeply entrenched in Chile and Zimbabwe, which produced large amounts of lithium. What’s more, China owned stakes in 15 of the 19 largest copper and cobalt mines in Congo.

One solution, proposed both by lobbyists and the Israeli government, was to use Gertler’s network. But the facts on the ground had turned against the Israeli: In 2019 Félix Tshisekedi took power in Kinshasa. Gertler was sidelined as new fixers began to reap Congo’s riches. In 2022 Congo began fighting a war against a Rwanda-backed rebel group called the M23, whose political wing is led by a former Kabila loyalist. Former president Joseph Kabila, Gertler’s friend and best contact, was sentenced to death in absentia in 2025, after allying himself with the rebel side.

Once the arbitration case levied by Moises and Mendi Gertner was in full swing in 2024, it became much clearer how exactly Gertler had amassed his vast portfolio of mining and oil assets that led to his sanctioning. He testified that he paid Katumba to distribute money in local communities and gave cash loans to the central bank of Congo. (His lawyers maintain that such payments were “in no way improper or unusual.”)

In May 2024 the Treasury Department began exploring a limited easing of sanctions on Gertler to facilitate his departure from Congo—a proposal that would allow him to sell his holdings in copper and cobalt mines in exchange for withdrawing from the country entirely. The Biden administration offered to lift sanctions on Gertler if he left Congo, but negotiations stalled and his continued presence in the country remains a complicating factor in American efforts to diversify its supply chains and recapture some of the gains made by the Chinese government.

Last November the US Geological Survey released its third list of materials that it said were “essential for national security, economic stability, and supply chain resilience,” an alphabet of substances from aluminum, through copper and cobalt, all the way to zinc and zirconium. The list ran to 60 minerals. China now dominates the supply chain for more than half of them.