Research by the American think-tank The Sentry continues into the business and financial interests of Africa's most unstable countries, with the aim of understanding, and unmasking, those who gain from and in critical and conflict situations. Beyond and beyond the arms dealers who profit 'by trade'.

One of the most investigated countries is South Sudan, whose political and military leadership The Sentry has already denounced several times those profiteers’ way of managing national resources. The Sentry demonstrates how, using different strategies and methods, they had managed to pocket the proceeds of oil and other precious minerals, and how they had successfully set up activities that have profited in almost all fields of the economy, in cahoots with various foreign accomplices, also thanks to whom they had been able to transfer the ill-gotten gain abroad.

To learn more, we recommend reading The Taking of South Sudan, a series of rapports that has grown into its fifth instalment in recent days.

The new document, Cash Grab, recounts a financial scandal involving an astronomical sum that deprived the country of essential goods at a particularly critical moment for the population that was literally on the brink of starvation. The subtitle is unequivocal: How a Billion-Dollar Credit Scam Robbed South Sudan of Fuel, Food, and Medicine.

The facts relate to a credit line opened between 2012 and 2015 by a Qatari bank, Qatar National Bank (Qnb), and Stanbic Bank, part of a holding company providing financial services in Kenya and South Sudan.

The loan was to be used to provide letters of credit to traders who, using them as support, would be able to exchange the local currency - the South Sudanese pound (Ssp) whose official exchange rate was then 3.16 - into dollars and pay for the imported goods once they arrived at their destination.

The country was then in a very critical financial situation. Due to a dispute over the rights of passage of its crude oil in the Sudanese oil facilities, it had blocked its extraction, depriving itself of practically the only exported commodity and source of spendable currency on the international market.

Letters of credit were supposed to address the lack of dollars in the country, thus allowing the import of essential goods.

In 2012, when the line of credit was opened, 37% of the population was on the brink of starvation. Things worsened dramatically with the outbreak of civil war in December 2013. In June 2015, according to the Global Hunger Index - a multi-statistical tool that measures the level of hunger in more than a hundred countries around the world - most areas of the country were in a critical situation and several were already considered to be in famine emergency.

There was a very similar situation in health care, with 4 million people in need of immediate intervention and 20 per cent of health facilities unable to intervene due to lack of fuel for the machinery needed for diagnosis and treatment, and even basic medicines.

Today, according to estimates of the relevant UN agencies, there are about 7 million, 60% of the Sudanese population on the brink of famine.

If the line of credit had worked as planned, the financial crisis could have been tamped down and the dramatic deterioration of the population's living conditions would have been avoided.

Things turned out very differently.

Researchers at The Sentry found that from the very program beginning, multi-million dollar contracts were awarded to foreign front companies and wholesale traders with no international experience. Many of the beneficiaries could be traced back to members of the leadership, including family members of President Salva Kiir, the then governor of the central bank, Kornelio Koriom, and several senior army officers.

In many cases, duly signed purchase and sale contracts were missing, while the central bank had failed to carry out proper checks and monitoring of the program implementation. In addition, official documents seen by researchers prove that huge sums were transferred to Kenyan and Ugandan banks without the necessary proof that they were payments for goods actually received.

In essence, the country had been robbed of millions of dollars’ worth of food, fuel and basic medicines while the population was literally dying of starvation and disease.

The situation was already clearly described in the report submitted to the president and parliament by the Auditor General of the state (equivalent of our Court of Auditors) at the end of 2015. It described the procedural confusion that had facilitated the fraud but did not name the fraudsters.

Following the report there were no investigations and therefore no one paid for the theft of money intended for the country. There was no legal action, or political action, even after the Auditor General's report circulated on social media in August 2021.

It is no coincidence that in 2021, South Sudan ranks last in the corruption index compiled annually by Transparency International.

The South Sudanese government has of course never paid the debt it incurred. The National Bank of Qatar initiated legal action at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the debt repayment was rescheduled. It will be repaid, of course, from the state budget.

A state whose coffers have been long and heavily looted, as denounced a year ago by the Human Rights Commission, according to which political, military and business leaders in South Sudan have illegally siphoned off tens of millions of dollars.

Thus, the South Sudanese have been robbed twice: first of the resources needed to supply them with essential goods, and second of those used to cover up the theft perpetrated by their rulers. Resources that could have alleviated the country's deep crisis and the suffering of its people.

See, Sud Sudan. Nuova maxi truffa sulla pelle dei cittadini