• US Treasury sanctions PARECO-FF, CDMC, East Rise and Star Dragon over conflict coltan in eastern Congo on 12 August 2025.
• CDMC is accused of buying minerals extracted under armed control and selling them to Hong Kong traders who shipped via Rwanda.
• The measures freeze US assets and payments, complicating a 2023 Sakima-CDMC joint venture and 2025 export shipments.

The United States Treasury on Tuesday added four names to the Specially Designated Nationals list, directly targeting the value chain that brings tantalum, tin and tungsten from the hills of eastern Congo to the circuit boards of the global electronics industry. The package blacklists the armed group PARECO-FF, the Congolese mining cooperative CDMC which holds the Rubaya concession, and two Hong-Kong export houses, East Rise Corporation Ltd. and Star Dragon Corporation Ltd., for what officials describe as “systematic complicity in conflict financing, forced labour and the laundering of conflict minerals through Rwanda.”

PARECO-FF, a successor to the historical PARECO militia, controlled the Rubaya coltan belt between 2022 and March 2024, a window in which, according to Treasury investigators, it executed civilians, imposed illegal “production taxes” on artisanal miners and smuggled ore across the border into Rwanda. The group is now officially cut off from the dollar system, a move that also freezes any assets it may hold inside the United States or in institutions that clear through New York.

The Congolese cooperative CDMC is accused of purchasing those same minerals from PARECO-FF zones and then reselling them to East Rise and Star Dragon, both registered at the same one-room office in Hong-Kong’s Central district. Customs filings reviewed by Treasury show that East Rise alone imported two shipments of Congolese concentrate declared in February and May 2025, after the period cited in the sanctions notice, suggesting the trade continued almost until the moment the designations were published. The two companies have not responded to requests for comment.

For the estimated 15,000 artisanal miners who still dig the red earth of Rubaya with hand tools, the sanctions create an immediate dilemma. They can sell to CDMC’s buying counters and risk being tainted by association, or they can sell to the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels who took over the area in April 2024 and are already under U.S. sanctions. Either choice involves paying taxes to men with guns; neither guarantees a living wage. “We are not the perpetrators, we are the primary victims,” CDMC president Serge Mulumba said in a statement reported by Bloomberg, insisting his cooperative “categorically rejects” any link to armed groups and warning that the measures will only deepen poverty on the ground.

The political optics are equally complicated. Provincial deputies in North Kivu have described PARECO-FF as a “patriotic shield” against the M23 advance, a narrative that clashes with Washington’s portrayal of the militia as an extortion racket. Analysts note that the same armed actors now sanctioned were only months ago considered useful allies by Kinshasa’s beleaguered army units.

Beyond reputational damage, the designations have hard commercial consequences. CDMC is the 50 per cent Congolese partner in the Sakima-CDMC joint venture signed in 2023 to rehabilitate industrial mining at Rubaya. European engineering contractors who signed feasibility studies with the venture must now freeze dealings or risk secondary sanctions. East Rise (which still trades mining products from DRC)  and Star Dragon, meanwhile, face the possibility that any future cargo linked to them will be seized the moment it passes through a port that settles in dollars.

Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John K. Hurley framed the move as part of a broader strategy to secure “critical minerals vital for our national defense” by cleaning up supply chains. Critics counter that squeezing every link, from shovel to refiner, could simply push trade deeper into the black market. The miners, caught between competing armed tax collectors and the long arm of the U.S. Treasury, will discover the answer first.

Idriss Linge