When China Railway Group and Sinohydro, two major Chinese construction companies, pledged more than a decade ago to help rebuild and expand infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in return for a sizeable chunk of the country's mineral wealth, they took a giant gamble. The multibillion-dollar effort matched President Joseph Kabila's soaring political ambitions and the nation's pressing needs for roads, railways, and hospitals, yet its success was far from assured.

The largest-ever leak of African financial records and data, obtained by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and Mediapart and shared with The Sentry by PPLAAF and the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network, now shows that the Chinese state-owned enterprises had a few aces in the hole all along: a shell company, a slick intermediary with a network of companies, and BGFIBank DRC.1 The trove of documents and data, called the Congo Hold-up leak, reveals that the state enterprises used a middleman with accounts at the bank run by the president's brother to pump tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of the Kabilas, their associates, and businesses at crucial junctures in what are known as the Sicomines agreements.