[Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary...] the presidential candidate nominated by the incumbent in Democratic Republic of Congo for elections...due to take place on 23 December 2018...has assembled a campaign finance team containing officials who have overseen agencies, departments or projects in which significant public funds have disappeared over the last decade...Shadary himself was sanctioned by the European Union in May 2017...The EU accuses him of responsibility for the arrests of activists and members of the opposition, as well as the disproportionate use of force. Members of his ‘finance and logistics’ team include Moïse Ekanga Lushyma and Albert Yuma, two officials who have both run state agencies with a dubious track record of resource management. “When a presidential candidate, who is subject to European sanctions, aligns himself with people who have run key institutions in a regime already accused of widespread corruption, then there is a huge risk that the line between public money and private political interests will become blurred during this election campaign”, said Pete Jones at Global Witness. “We have called for investigations into these individuals and the institutions they run, but instead Shadary seems to be rewarding them with positions of power”...Ekanga is the head of the Office for Coordination and Monitoring of the Sino-Congolese Program (BCPSC), which manages the main business dealings between DRC and China. The Carter Center discovered that, between 2008 and 2014, hundreds of millions of dollars of Chinese loans, overseen by the BCPSC while under Ekanga’s stewardship, were not spent on infrastructure projects as intended. The BCPSC failed to account for the use of some $685 million in such loans.