THE GHOST CONTRACTORS

We find little or nothing about these companies. Although cited as beneficiaries of a contract with the MSP awaiting payment in 2022, they are almost absent from the most recent file in the National Directory of Congolese Companies. Their names are M2R-COMPANY MC, KOUMOU CONSTRUCTION KC SARLU, BD. COM SARL, MAISON AUBAINE M.A S.A.R.L.U, Natalia Sarlu, Solution Juste Confort, Pierre Anne Construction, etc. In most cases, contracts or calls for tenders are not recorded.

On September 20, 2021, Le Patriote, a newspaper known for its proximity to the regime in place, indicated that Solution Juste Confort, led by Juste Simplice Okabé, provided the MSP with medical-technical equipment for an amount of 80 million FCFA. This equipment included examination tables, complete hospital beds, delivery beds with accessories, metal baby scales, medical carts, mixed binocular microscopes, etc. According to the reception committee members, equipment was delivered more than five years late and was not always compliant. No sanction, penalties, or withdrawal from the market due to late, incomplete, or non-compliant delivery; the MSP does not defend itself against a visibly failing operator. Is it because of his relationship with former minister Saturnin Okabé? In the list of markets approved in 2022, M2R-Company and Pierre-Anne Construction, respectively, represent more than one billion FCFA in the budget of the Ministry of Health.

The Natalia Sarlu company is the only case where Minister Lydia Mikolo signed a call for tenders for seventy-eight million FCFA from the Covid Fund. 

Apart from this call for tenders by direct agreement, there is no trace of this company, nothing in the national company file, nothing in the Official Journal, and nothing about its manager, Nathalie Mireille Onani. Natalia Sarlu’s address on rue Moukoukoulou corresponds to a private home guarded by gendarmes. This address would be the home of a regime official whom we have not been able to identify formally.

We only know that Natalia Sarlu was created in 2011 in Brazzaville. The company is headquartered at 2006 rue Moukoukoulou, Moungali, Brazzaville. Its director, Natalie Mireille Onani, was born in 1985 in BOUNDJI. The company officially has only one employee specializing in construction or structural work. We are far from the hospital beds, medical mattresses, and serum feet supply.

The PWYP Congo 2020-2022 report on the health system mentions the execution in April 2021 for an amount of two hundred and fifty million FCFA of an order from the Blood Transfusion Center by the supplier WAGENIA.

The award decision for this company is unavailable, and its website does not mention any names of directors. Wagenia is headed by Camille (or Kamil?) Sarkis, according to a footnote in the International Finance Corporation’s The Business of Health in Africa report. This note is confirmed by the French commercial register, which lists in Puteaux the Wagenia company managed by Camille Sarkis of Lebanese nationality with residence in Kinshasa, avenue de Wagenia.

Camille Sarkis is believed to be the son of Sarkis Garabet Soghanalian, also known as Serge Soghanalian. The latter was one of the most important arms dealers of contemporary times.

Serge Soghanalian deliveries, in collaboration with those of Victor Bout via Kinshasa and Gabon, played a decisive role in the military victory of the Cobras militias of Sassou Nguesso during the civil war of 1997.

The company uses the services of BYBLOS BANK EUROPE SA in Brussels, where the arms dealer has offices. Dirk Vermeiren, senior manager of global logistics at the Baxter laboratory — infamous for the contaminated blood affair —sits on the board of directors of this bank.

Without a receipt document and images, we cannot say whether the April 2021 delivery in the middle of the presidential election by WAGENIA is medical equipment or weapons in anticipation of possible unrest.