A year ago in June, a group of bankers marched into a U.S. Treasury office in Washington on perhaps the most important mission of their careers: to save a country from financial collapse. Among them was Willy Mulamba, Citigroup Inc.’s top executive in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a resource-rich but devastatingly poor nation in central Africa. Mulamba, a 51-year-old Congolese banker who had returned home after years abroad, was part of a small team desperate to dissuade Treasury officials from cutting the nation off from the U.S. banking system. In January 2018, a few weeks after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Gertler, a family friend named Shlomo Abihassira had walked into Afriland’s Kinshasa headquarters and opened an account for a newly registered company with the unpronounceable name RDHAGD Sarlu, bank documents show. Over the next five months, Abihassira, who lives in Israel, made 17 deposits totaling $19 million. That August, he transferred the funds in one go to another Afriland account registered to a company called Dorta Invest SAU, according to bank records.
SOURCE: BLOOMBERG