Mossad, a mining magnate and a mystery in Congo

richest men does his business from a discreet floor in the Israel Diamond Exchange and lives in a nondescript villa in one of Tel Aviv’s drabber suburbs. At home he has been little known to the public. But across Africa his name has long resounded controversially, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo (). , aged 48, the scion of a diamond-trading family, began doing business there in the 1990s and has since bought lucrative mining concessions, partly due to his closeness to Laurent and Joseph Kabila, father and son, who presided over the country, one after the other, from 1997 until three years ago. Mr Gertler’s interests in Congo have included diamond, copper and , some of which he sold on to Glencore, one of the world’s biggest commodities traders. He has long been controversial. In 2017 the American Treasury under the Magnitsky Act, whereby the assets of alleged human-rights offenders or corrupt operators can be frozen. It said Mr Gertler had “amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” in Congo and of using “his close friendship with President Joseph Kabila to act as a middleman for mining asset sales”.