SFO settles decade-long fraud probe suit tied to Congo mining bribes

Britain's Serious Fraud Office has reached a settlement with Kazakh miner ENRC, closing a lawsuit accusing the agency and law firm Dechert of inflicting substantial financial harm during a bribery investigation, drawing a line under litigation stretching back more than a decade.

The deal, disclosed by ENRC and Dechert, appears to conclude one of the SFO's most drawn-out and reputationally damaging cases. The agency had examined claims that ENRC paid bribes to win mining contracts in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2009 and 2012, allegations the company always rejected. London's High Court had already ruled that the SFO would not have launched its probe without first persuading Neil Gerrard, then ENRC's lawyer at Dechert, to work against his client's interests.

A different company today

Matthew Wagstaff, the SFO's director of legal services, said the agency was "confident that the SFO's wrongdoing between 2011 and 2013 could never happen again," calling it "a fundamentally different organisation." The regulator had dropped its underlying case against ENRC in 2023 without charges, citing insufficient admissible evidence.

A legacy issue finally closed

ENRC has since been restructured and rebranded as Eurasian Resources Group, which today operates the Metalkol, Frontier and Boss Mining copper-cobalt assets in the DRC under different ownership and governance arrangements than those in place during the period under investigation. The settlement's timing, more than a decade after the underlying allegations first surfaced, illustrated how long legacy governance controversies can continue to shadow a company's operations, even as it works to build a more modern reputation — including, in ERG's case, through initiatives such as securing responsible-sourcing certification at its Metalkol tailings operation and courting fresh international investment for its Congolese assets. For the DRC itself, the settlement offered little practical change: the underlying mining contracts awarded during the period under scrutiny had long since been renegotiated or absorbed into ERG's current operating structure, leaving the case as more a matter of historical reckoning between London and the company than a live issue for Congolese regulators.

Sources

• Miningmx: SFO settles decade-long ENRC fraud probe suit, 02 Sept 2026

Photo: Processing of copper-cobalt ore near Kolwezi in the DRC's Katanga copperbelt. Gécamines (Zairian company), Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.