A Settlement That Closes the Books — But Whose Books?
On March 6, 2026, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service issued a penal order against Fleurette, a Dutch-registered company formerly at the heart of Israeli businessman Dan Gertler’s business empire. The company agreed to pay €25.8 million to Dutch authorities to close the “Samos” investigation, opened in 2018. The charges: bribery of foreign public officials in the DRC in 2010 and 2011, through alleged payments to Augustin Katumba Mwanke, political and financial adviser to then-President Joseph Kabila.
The settlement ends the investigation. No individual has been indicted — not a single executive, intermediary, or Gertler himself. Fleurette’s lawyers confirmed that Dutch prosecutors have committed to pursuing no other company or individual in connection with the case.
On paper, justice has been served. In practice, several questions remain unanswered.
The Loss: Over $1.36 Billion. The Fine: €25.8 Million.
To understand the disproportion, it is necessary to return to the figures established by Washington. According to the US Treasury, opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals involving Gertler cost the DRC more than $1.36 billion in revenues between 2010 and 2012 alone. This was the basis on which OFAC sanctioned Gertler in December 2017 under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
Against that figure, the Dutch fine represents less than two percent of the alleged harm — and it goes into Dutch coffers, not Congolese ones.
This is not an isolated case. The Fleurette settlement is part of a broader sequence of out-of-court agreements involving Gertler’s associate in the DRC, Glencore. In May 2022, the Swiss group pleaded guilty in the United States and agreed to pay more than $1 billion in combined fines for bribery across multiple countries, including the DRC. In December 2022, Glencore reached a separate agreement with Kinshasa worth $180 million. In August 2024, the Swiss attorney general’s office ordered a compensatory claim of an additional $150 million, plus a nominal two-million-franc fine.
According to Public Eye, Switzerland ultimately received more from Glencore than the DRC itself — and none of that money flowed back to the Congolese population.
The Architecture of Settlements Without Trials
The Glencore–Gertler–Fleurette sequence illustrates a mechanism now well established in the international management of mining corruption cases: the negotiated penal settlement as the preferred mode of closure. Each relevant jurisdiction — the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands — closed its file against payment of a negotiated sum. None led to a full criminal trial. No individual was convicted.
This model has its own logic. For companies, it avoids lengthy, costly proceedings and preserves corporate reputation while rewarding cooperation. For prosecutors, it produces fast, measurable results. For the governments of multinational host countries — Switzerland, the Netherlands — it converts foreign affairs into domestic revenues.
But it leaves one fundamental question unanswered: to whom does the harm belong? The undervalued mining funds, the licences obtained below market price, the fiscal revenues captured by offshore structures — these losses are Congolese. The fines, for the most part, are not.
Gertler: Still Sanctioned, But for How Long?
The Fleurette settlement does not resolve another dimension of the case: the status of Dan Gertler himself. The businessman remains on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals list since 2017. US sanctions bar him from dollar transactions and dealings with any American entity.
But this position is not fixed. In January 2021, the Trump administration quietly granted Gertler a one-year licence allowing him to re-access the US financial system — a decision made in the final days of the administration and reversed within weeks by the Biden administration. Under Biden, discussions on a possible easing of sanctions were documented, particularly in the context of the strategic partnership between Washington and Kinshasa on critical minerals.
The logic was clear: allowing Gertler to sell his residual stakes in copper and cobalt projects would open the door to their acquisition by Western operators, reducing Chinese dominance in the sector. Civil society organisations, including Human Rights Watch, argued that the legal conditions for lifting the sanctions were not met, and that maintaining them was consistent with US national security interests — in part because Gertler’s continued involvement compromises a significant portion of the cobalt supply chain.
As of today, the sanctions remain in force. The Dutch settlement, by closing the European chapter of the case without individual prosecution, does not alter that status — but it mechanically reduces the judicial pressure bearing on Gertler’s network.
The DRC: A Spectator in Its Own Case
The bilateral agreement concluded in February 2022 between the Congolese state and Dan Gertler — whose full terms were never made public — had already raised questions. It allowed Gertler to recover disputed mining and oil assets valued at more than $2 billion, ending the legal dispute between Kinshasa and the businessman.
That agreement was signed before the Swiss and Dutch proceedings. It was concluded before the reality of payments to Katumba Mwanke — now formally established by the Dutch prosecution service — had been recognised by any court. It was negotiated at a time when the DRC was seeking Western investment and looking to rebalance its economic alliances.
The question that remains: in a case where the Congolese state is the designated primary victim, what is the net balance after years of proceedings? The Dutch fine goes to the Netherlands. The Swiss compensatory claims remain in Switzerland. The $180 million paid to Kinshasa by Glencore is, to date, the only direct flow to the DRC — a fraction of a loss estimated at more than $1.36 billion.
For the mining industry and international institutions that advocate contract transparency and resource governance, the Gertler-Glencore-Fleurette case will remain an uncomfortable case study. Not because justice failed to function — it did, in its own way. But because the question of for whom it functioned remains, stubbornly, without a satisfactory answer.
M&B