inside DRC’s gas and oil auction — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (en-GB)

The five-bedroom house in a well-to-do neighbourhood of Calgary, Canada, gives little away. There is certainly no evidence from its neatly painted exterior that this is the corporate headquarters of an energy company entrusted with extracting gas from a “killer lake” in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Alfajiri Energy was set up in January last year, just weeks after DRC announced its intention to auction off a raft of oil and gas blocks. One year on, the little-known company won the rights to a gas block in Lake Kivu, which holds vast amounts of gases that threaten to explode into the air if improperly managed.

Now, an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Reuters can reveal that DRC’s oil and gas block auction has been plagued with apparent preferential treatment and backroom deals. And major questions have been raised about the company tasked with extracting gas from Lake Kivu’s depths.

In October last year, the Ministry of Hydrocarbons announced that Alfajiri had got past the first stage of the auction, despite its complete lack of credentials or expertise for the job at hand. Given that Alfajiri had been set up just 10 months previously, it could not have provided the three years of financial statements required by law for it to go through to the next stage.

In December 2022, experts from DRC’s Ministry of Hydrocarbons produced a damning report on Alfajiri, seen by TBIJ and Reuters. This detailed how its bid lacked vital information such as a work plan or feasibility study and that only three of its 20 supposed workers had actually committed to the project. Overall, Alfajiri scored lowest of the three companies bidding for the gas block.

Yet the same experts then produced a second report, which represented a remarkable U-turn from the first. Here, the writers had deleted key concerns and changed scores, which were tallied up – incorrectly – to reposition Alfajiri as the highest-scoring bidder. That result was confirmed a month later, when the ministry announced that the company had won the rights to extract gas from Lake Kivu.