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February 23rd, 2011

Update: Kenyan Killed in Congo Gold Smuggling Probe

Via: Reuters:

A senior Kenyan official has been shot dead while investigating gold smuggling from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenyan police said on Monday.

Eric Kiraithe, a police spokesman, said the man was an official at Kenya’s Revenue Authority.

“We have not arrested any suspects involved in gold smuggling but we have identified three Kenyans who are part of the cartels involved in gold smuggling,” he said.

Police commissioner Matthew Iteere told reporters an investigation had been launched into the shooting.

Kenyan media said the official was shot by four armed men at the weekend while he was sitting in his car, waiting for the gate to his house to be opened.

They said he was leading the investigation into the discovery of two and a half tonnes of gold worth about $100 million.

An unnamed official in Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province told Reuters last week that “large amounts” of gold from eastern Congo had been recovered in Nairobi and Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam.

Congo’s government has not confirmed the smuggling.

Three provinces in Congo’s east are subject to a mining ban imposed last year by President Joseph Kabila to weed out what he called the “mafia groups” controlling the mineral trade.

A United Nations report published last year said the gold trade in North and South Kivu provinces was worth around $160 million per year, with at least 80 percent of it smuggled illegally out of the country.

Earlier this month seven foreigners were arrested in the eastern city of Goma on suspicion of trying to smuggle hundreds of kilograms of gold from the country.

—End Update—

Via: Houston Chronicle:

A private jet that flew four international businessmen to the Democratic Republic of the Congo where they are being held on gold-smuggling allegations was provided by CAMAC International, a Houston oil-trading company owned by one of the city’s richest men and a brother of one of the passengers.

Kase Lawal, a Nigerian-born immigrant who has overseen CAMAC’s rise to a $2.4 billion private company — said to be the second-largest black-owned business in the U.S. — and who was recently appointed to an advisory post in the Obama administration, is the half-brother of Mukaila Aderemi “Mickey” Lawal, who was detained along with fellow Houstonian Carlos St. Mary and two other businessmen as their plane was preparing to depart from Goma, a city in the mineral-laden eastern half of Congo.

The country recently banned the export of gold and other key minerals in an attempt to decriminalize its mining industries.

A CAMAC spokesman would not explain why Mickey Lawal, a 50-year-old company executive in charge of Nigerian operations, was on the plane or what his role in the transaction may have been.

He also did not say why CAMAC allowed the Gulfstream it leases from a Dallas company to be used in the mysterious mission, which ended on Feb. 3 when Congolese intelligence police arrested the men and flight crew, impounded the plane and seized almost $7 million in U.S. dollars, and gold bars valued at some $20 million.

…

Kase Lawal, 56, came to the U.S. in the 1970s and earned degrees from Texas Southern University and Prairie View A&M.

Well-connected politically to members of both major parties, he was named by President Barack Obama to the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.