Glencore paid over US$75 million to Dan Gertler, a businessman accused of bribing DRC officials to advance his mining interests...Global Witness said. The payments were due to be paid to...Gécamines...Glencore did not disclose in company filings that it was instead making these payments to Gertler, a known corruption risk, according to Global Witness. “The fact that Gertler was the recipient of the payments comes to light only weeks after Glencore bought Gertler out of mining assets it held jointly with him in the DRC in a billion dollar deal,” the advocacy group noted. A Global Witness investigation...found that from 2013 to 2016 Toronto-listed Katanga Mining, majority-owned by Glencore, made “signature bonus” and other payments totalling over $75 million to Dan Gertler’s Africa Horizons Investment company, a business unit of Gertler's privately-held Fleurette Group...“It’s outrageous that Glencore has been making payments to a friend of the Congolese President who has been accused of bribery and corruption, and then not telling its shareholders or the public that it’s done so,” said Pete Jones...[from]...Global Witness...“The discrepancy between Katanga Mining’s filings and the real recipient of these huge payments runs the risk of misleading investors. Gertler is a well-known corruption risk in the DRC mining sector and Gécamines is famously opaque. Investors need to ask Glencore why it felt comfortable making these payments and why it didn’t clearly disclose Gertler as the recipient,” said Jones...Glencore said it had complied with its disclosure obligations under Canadian securities law and the rules governing the Toronto Stock Exchange. It said it had declared the payments to Gertler’s company as payments to Gecamines in its EITI submission “because the payments discharged Kamoto Copper Company (KCC’s) obligations to make these payments to Gecamines”...Glencore said that it was satisfied that there was an underlying basis for the assignment of royalty rights from Gecamines to Gertler...The DRC-based Fleurette Group on Friday responded to the criticism directed at it by Global Witness...Fleurette noted that $3 billion in tax revenue was paid by the Mutanda and KCC assets since Fleurette’s initial involvement (both assets in which Fleurette was heavily invested but has now exited) which Gecamines had to use to cover off a pre-existing Gecamines debt resulting in a loss to Fleurette and which the DRC government continues to be entitled to receive royalty payments for KCC and Mutanda irrespective of Fleurette.