Chinese operators kept mining cobalt, stopped selling it, and poured everything into copper. Six months on they are richer, more liquid, and holding the tonnes the state gated.
Alert level: Elevated on the constitutional track. The treaty has entered the mandate fight.
An investor can hold a treaty-backed first claim on a Congolese asset and still lose the tonnes it produces. Nothing in either instrument says which claim comes first.
America's new Africa envoy is on his second tour of the continent, and the deal his pitch is built on isn't on the itinerary. The omission isn't a snub. It's the clearest available signal of how Washington is actually using the SPA: as a precedent text, not a relationship that still needs tending.
Sibéka was judicially dissolved in Belgium in December 2023. It still holds 20 percent of MIBA, the Congolese state diamond producer. That stake has outlived three owners and one death certificate, and its percentage never changed once.
Alert level: Elevated on institutions and corridors. Not on signature theater.
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