In an investigation conducted by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), Kim Rebholz, former director of the Mangrove Marine Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, blows the whistle on the large-scale plundering of the park.

• The whistleblower also reveals the brutal reprisals he and his family suffered.
• The investigation reveals the scale and diversity of exploitation, including a 400-hectare oil palm plantation and a deep-water port in protected areas of the park, ports used for the illegal export of logs and illegal oil trafficking, and oil activities that seriously threaten the mangroves and the waters that sustain them.

Adèle* knew what was coming as she was led away by two of the armed men. She looked at her husband, who was trying to shield their one-year-old son from the gun being pointed at them. She knew they could be killed if she fought back. So when the men told her to go into the bedroom, she did. And she stayed quiet as they raped her in turn.

The attackers said they were there for her husband, Kim Rebholz. A French-Swiss national, Rebholz had been hired by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2022 to safeguard the Mangrove Marine Park, an internationally-recognised nature reserve on the country’s tiny coastline. Sitting in a hotel in Paris several months later, he shakes his head. “So they were there for me but the worst happened to my wife.” 

It was not the first or last of the attacks on his family, which ultimately drove them out of the country. That left the Mangrove Marine Park at the mercy of oil smugglers, illegal agriculture and rampantly destructive international companies. Rebholz is now fighting to expose the environmental crimes he witnessed, which he says lead all the way up to the country’s former president.

Rainforests, and especially mangroves, are vital buffers against the climate crisis thanks to their ability to absorb and store the carbon dioxide that is trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere and causing more and more extreme weather. So the setting for this year’s Cop climate talks in Belém, a sprawling Brazilian city on the edge of the rainforest, is acutely symbolic. But the Amazon has been so ruthlessly plundered that emissions from its forest fires are greater than its capacity to absorb CO2. 

It is now the Congo Basin rainforest, a thick band of dark green stretching across central Africa, that offers the world’s best hope in the fight against climate change. As steward of the largest part of the rainforest, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) presents itself on the world stage as a “solutions country” for the climate crisis.

That was what led Rebholz to launch his conservation project there, with the ambition to extend the protected area across the region. Looking back, he says: “I was very hopeful that we could do a good job.” 

On first meeting, Rebholz appears mild-mannered to the point of timidity, his sentences often tapering off to become barely audible. He calls himself “naive” for funnelling so much of his own money into his conservation efforts in DRC. 

But this belies a steely determination that saw him return to DRC after flying his wife and son out to Paris following the attacks. “I felt these people had to be … not punished, but stopped because obviously, if all this happens, it’s because the stakes are high.” 

The best way to visit the Mangrove Marine Park is by boat, where you have to duck to avoid long aerial roots as you weave through a labyrinth of waterways. Either side the splayed spider-like fingers of the mangrove trees reach down into the water, providing a nursery for fish, a barrier against coastal erosion and a highly effective means of storing carbon. This is where the mighty river Congo finishes its 3,000-mile journey from the highlands of Zambia to the Atlantic Ocean. 

Manatees thrive in this fragile ecosystem, where seawater mingles with fresh, though they are rarely seen. Endangered sea turtles, however, are easy to spot when they return to the white sand beaches every October to lay their eggs. Their nests are protected by eco-guards from the park, who take the eggs to incubation tanks and keep the newly hatched baby turtles safe from poachers and rising sea levels. 

Back in 1992, the government of Zaire, as the country was then known, designated this land a protected area by ministerial decree. Shortly after, its importance was recognised under the international Ramsar Convention, which should offer even stronger protection. The marshy swampland spreading out from the coast is subject to the strictest regulations, with Congolese law banning hunting and fishing; any industrial, agricultural or forestry activities; and, significantly, “any action likely to harm the natural development of fauna and flora and, more generally, to alter the character of the reserve”. 

There is, however, some wriggle room. The Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), which is in charge of protecting the reserve, can lift these restrictions for certain people in certain circumstances, “provided that these remain compatible with conservation objectives”. 
But the park stretches much further than that. Follow the channels inland and the marshes make way for a savannah-like wilderness, cut through by tributaries of the Congo River. Here, the law allows for some traditional fishing but nothing that would “disturb the natural environment”. So Rebholz was shocked when, patrolling the park a few months into the job, he came across what appeared to be an industrial-sized palm oil plantation.

Rebholz remembers this as the time he began to wade into dangerous territory. “In the space of about a month,” he says, “I put my foot in it on several occasions.” 

Staring out at the expanse of tens of thousands of palm trees, he asked his deputies: “What exactly is this?” His deputies knew perfectly well what they were looking at. Rebholz says they seemed almost embarrassed to have to tell him that it belonged to the company of the former president, Joseph Kabila. Kabila spent almost two decades in power, stepping down in 2019 after a series of deadly protests and disputed elections. Accused of having influenced the result and negotiating an exit deal with incoming president Felix Tshisekedi, he remained an influential figure in DRC – until recently.

The plantation itself is large enough to be seen from space. Clearly within the boundaries of the park, in what should be a wilderness, are neat rows of the tell-tale star shapes of palms covering more than 400 hectares.

Satellite view of the oil palm plantation in the Mangrove Marine Park. Source: Google, 2025. Muanda, DRC.

A recent visit shows the plantation is still thriving. A weathered sign by the side of the road carries the letters GEL, for Kabila’s company, Grands Élevages du Bas-Congo. Either side, there are rows and rows of pineapple-like trees, bearing large bunches of the red-orange kernels that can be processed for use in margarine, shampoo and animal feed.

What do we know about GEL?

The Société des Grands Élevages du Bas-Congo (GEL) manages at least 60,000 hectares in the province of Kongo Central (formerly Bas Congo). It specialises in cattle and sheep farming as well as field crops. The company owns the island of Mateba on the Congo River. But GEL is not just an agricultural company, it is one of many private companies implicated in a vast alleged embezzlement of public funds in the DRC under the former regime. According to the Congo Hold-Up investigation, Alain Wan and Marc Piedbœuf, two close associates of Joseph Kabila, were long-time majority shareholders before selling the company to Ferme Espoir, a company owned by the former president and his children. Alain Wan and Marc Piedbœuf now claim to have no connection with the company.

Rebholz hands us a document, dated 2023, with a map, which states that it was created by the Department of Forestry Management. This marks out the plantation with the legend: “Land appropriated by a private plantation of palm trees belonging to the former head of state within the Marine Mangroves Park, which considerably reduces the park’s surface area.” Rebholz says that as well as violating the park’s protected status, the plantation robs large mammals of a vital habitat and that buffalos have almost disappeared from the area.

Other park employees, along with residents from nearby villages, confirm the land grabbing. One of them states bluntly, “It still belongs to Kabila … His base is here. This part of the park was originally used for cows, but they ended up planting palm trees anyway.” A former local official acknowledges that the land belongs to the “boss” of the former regime.

It isn’t the first time Kabila is accused of appropriating land in a protected area. In 2021, a Congolese NGO published a report alleging that a farm he owned encroached on a national park in eastern DRC. 

Following the publication of the report, the NGO received a summons to the magistrates court for defamation. The night the case was dismissed, “a commando unit of about 15 people climbed over the fence and broke into my house”, Timothée Mbuya, president of the NGO, told the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa, a Paris-based NGO known as PPLAAF, months after the attack.

“They threatened my family with Kalashnikovs and assaulted some of them. They pointed a gun at my wife and children and searched the entire house, saying that when I was found, my body would be taken to the morgue. 

“They pointed a gun at my second youngest son and said if he did not tell them where I was hiding, he would die in my place.” Eventually they left. Mbuya said the attackers were heavily armed and in military uniform. They remain unpunished.

Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Grands Élevages du Bas-Congo could not be reached.

Before starting the job, Rebholz had been carefully studying satellite images of the area and had come across a “logging port that stood out a mile”. So on one of his first patrols, he put on his park ranger’s uniform, turned up at the gate and asked to inspect the premises. There he confirmed what he had seen via satellite: an illegal port serving as a gateway to the Atlantic ocean with thousands of logs – some with cross-sections as tall as the men working there – stacked and ready for export. 

“These are not local species, they are logs from the main part of the Congolese rainforest,” Rebholz says – the forest he had been so determined to protect. The port is owned by a Chinese group called Congo Dihao. Congo Dihao is closely linked to a logging company with one of the murkiest track records in Congo. A recent study commissioned by international and Congolese conservation agencies notes: “The only major company that mines and exports [African Rosewood] is Congo Dihao (formerly Maniema Union).”

It is that firm’s origins that connect it to DRC’s violent past. Reports suggest Maniema Union was previously linked to one of Kabila’s most brutal enforcers, General Amisi, also known as “Tango Four”. Amisi, who is now inspector general of DRC’s armed forces, has been sanctioned by the UK, EU and US for violent repression and human rights abuses. 

Blaise Mongo, an environmental activist, tells us that when he exposed illegal logging by Maniema Union and the involvement of General Tango Four in the media in 2018, soldiers attacked his house and kidnapped his son. “To this day, I have lost my son,” he says. 

“They continue to exploit the area, the same Chinese who were with General Tango Four and Maniema Union 2. They have just changed their name and found new political allies.” 

From this makeshift port in the Mangrove Marine Park, the logs start their 11,000-kilometre route to China, according to a Global Witness report from 2023, which found the timber was exported to Wan Peng International via a port near Shanghai.

Congo Dihao said it owns a legal port for which it has all the necessary authorisations. It said Maniema Union is not affiliated with its company.

Wan Peng International and Amisi did not respond to requests for comment.

After his conspicuous inspection of the logging operation, Rebholz says his next mistake was reporting the danger posed by another illegal port – this time a base for smuggling oil. He came across it after a “surreal” meeting with the chief of a local area to discuss the possible installation of a landing bay on the river coast. When he returned to the site, he found all the mangroves had been cut and the land was now divided into plots storing thousands of plastic barrels of fuel. 

Rebholz says the port was a critical staging post for the trade in oil smuggled across the short stretch of sea from a refinery on Angola’s northern coast and on to DRC’s capital, Kinshasa. An oil industry executive told him the smugglers’ traffic accounted for nearly a third of fuel sold in Kinshasa.

After uncovering the operation, Rebholz wrote to the district administrator to flag the risk posed by an unregulated, uncontrolled smugglers’ port piled high with cans of gasoline. 

His concerns were tragically prescient. Three months later, there was a giant explosion when 8,000 barrels of oil went up in smoke. More than three hectares of mangroves were destroyed, according to local press reports. 

Rebholz had seen enough. Listing the various ways his park was being plundered and destroyed, he wrote to his superiors demanding a commission of inquiry be set up. It was the moment everything changed.“Within a month and a half,” he says, “the reprisals came thick and fast.”

On 2 February 2023, seven hooded men armed with machetes and guns broke into his house in the middle of the night. They put the gun to his head and faked his execution. “All this happened in front of our little boy,” he says. Then two of the men took his wife to their bedroom and threatened to kill her if she resisted. Looking back, Rebholz says: “I didn’t know she had been raped until they left because she was sure that if she had yelled and cried, I would have got mad and got shot, cut into pieces.”

Two people who were working at the Mangrove Marine Park at the time and a former local official say an attack took place. And there is a paper trail of sorts. Rebholz filed a complaint with the military prosecutor’s office at the time. After two years of waiting with no investigation launched, he renewed that complaint in April this year. 

Rebholz’s lawyer, Venance Kalenga, returned to the prosecutor’s office, where they confirmed the receipt Rebholz had been given bore their official stamp but could find no record of his case. “It is as if they pretended to register the complaint and then made it disappear so as not to leave any trace,” Kalenga says. “I think there must be political influence or high-level interests at play.” For now, however, no one has been found responsible for the attack.

His lawyer found out there had been a meeting of the local security council immediately after the attacks to decide on Rebholz’ case. “One of the participants informed me that it had even been decided to arrest my client and accuse him of lying. Fortunately, he had already left the country.”

The local official working in the area at the time says Rebholz was accused of paying funds destined for the park into his own private account, which Rebholz denies. The official confirms that Rebholz had tried to expose Kabila’s land grab. “He wrote his reports, which have proven to be true to this day. It was so obvious that he had to disappear.” The family were attacked, the official says, but he then appears to contradict himself by insisting it was not politically motivated. “It is more likely that people working in the park did it because they themselves had things to hide, and they were given the means to carry out this attack.”

Despite everything, Rebholz wanted to continue with his work. But when the authorities said they could not ensure his safety, he finally accepted it was not feasible. At that point, he wrote to DRC’s environment minister – copying in president Tshisekedi – to lay out the environmental destruction he had discovered in the park and the people he believed responsible for it. They included Cosma Wilungula who, as former director general of the ICCN, was ultimately responsible for the Mangroves Park; Augustin Ngumbi, who was at the time DRC’s representative to the high-profile international wildlife protection agency CITES; and the former president of the DRC, Joseph Kabila. 

Ngumbi said he was not informed of Rebholz’ allegations at the time and that they were “pure fabrication”. Wilungula said the allegations were “false, misleading and politically motivated” and that he had left ICCN before Rebholz started as director of the park. He said Kabila’s company never posed a threat to the park and that the former president had helped combat poaching there. Representatives for the DRC government, the ICCN and the prosecutor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Before the mangroves were given protected status, large industrial interests were already making their mark on this area. Rights to drill for oil on DRC’s coast were first granted in the 1960s, in an area that overlaps large parts of the park. They are now held by French-British oil company Perenco, which remains the country’s only producing oil operator, with wells both on and offshore.

Rebholz points again to satellite images to show the impact the company has had on the landscape and says the oil wells have left DRC’s coastline looking “like Swiss cheese”. It is illegal in DRC to routinely burn the excess methane released during oil extraction but Perenco has installed ground flares near people’s homes and crops that appear to do just that. Naked flames can be seen burning straight from the ground and there is clear evidence of oil spilt on the land.

The chief of a nearby village tells us that the sludge generated by drilling wells is dumped nearby and flows into the rivers when it rains. “It’s from these rivers that we get our fish and our drinking water, and take water for our crops. So you see, we are already consuming toxic products.” He said this has caused health problems for local residents. 

A former employee of the park says Perenco is the park’s biggest polluter. “When you go to the coast, you will find they dump their toxic waste directly into the ocean, even the fish are polluted.” Research confirms the coastal waters are highly contaminated. French consultancy VisioTerra found that, over a 10-year period, enough oil spilled from platforms and ships off DRC’s coast to cover half of Paris. 

Perenco now faces a court hearing in Paris for the environmental damage it has caused in DRC – in a case brought by Sherpa, a legal charity, and Friends of the Earth. Perenco has until February next year to respond to the case.

Perenco said its French subsidiary “strongly denies all the allegations made by the NGOs, which it considers procedurally inadmissible and, in any event, unfounded”. It said it is licensed to flare gas and denied the suggestion it dumps toxic waste. It added: “Drilling muds are treated according to international standards and pose no risk to the environment.” The company detailed the steps it takes in the event of accidental soil contamination. 

Perenco said its DRC’s operations are conducted in accordance with strict environmental standards. It said it “provides indispensable financial support and utility services to the local communities”, is a key employer and “actively contributes to the conservation of the environment”.  

Rebholz says when he was hired, Perenco was the park’s only source of funding. The multibillion-dollar oil company donated fuel for patrols and paid $60,000 a year in 2022, to cover salaries and conservation activities to protect turtle eggs and clean the beaches. 

It wasn’t enough, says the former employee. “The guards need to be provided for and camps need to be built inside the park, which has never been done.” He says guards cannot take a stand against the powerful people destroying the park. “We are here to protect the species, the flora and fauna, but they only look out for their own personal interests.” 

Much of the activity Rebholz documented can be seen from space and VisioTerra continues to monitor the park. Its director Serge Riazanoff confirms that they observed the fire at the oil smuggling port and can see that land has been taken over for oil palm cultivation.

“Large parts of the Mangrove Marine Park have been appropriated,” he says. Together with a group of researchers, he watches helplessly as the damage to the park mounts up. 

He called it “extremely serious” that the park director was violently harassed and expelled. “We’re very pessimistic about the future of the Mangrove Marine Park unless the DRC government truly commits to its protection. And that is not the case at the moment.”

Today the park faces perhaps its biggest threat – the construction of a deepwater port on its coastal edge by the UAE company DP World. Negotiations for the billion-dollar project have been mired in controversy from the outset. Whistleblowers say that the initial deal was structured to enrich associates of Kabila and the project was never put out to tender.

DP World and the Banana Port Papers

An investigation by PPLAAF (2018) shed light on the shady aspects of the Banana deep-water port project on the Atlantic coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Awarded without tender to the Emirati company Dubai Ports World (DP World) for an estimated amount of more than $1 billion, the contract reportedly gave rise to an opaque arrangement combining public and private interests. According to the Banana Port Papers, 40% of the capital's company responsible for managing the port was to be allocated to a private Congolese company suspected of having links to the entourage of the then-president. This scheme, which also allowed for indirect participation of actors close to the government within the public partner structure, could have enabled these beneficiaries to receive up to $45 million over seven years. Intermediaries, including businessman Moïse Ekanga and Alain Wan's company MW Afritec, both close to Joseph Kabila, were cited among the protagonists of this operation. According to internal documents, the first version of the environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) was drafted by a single consultant who was not accredited by the Congolese Ministry of the Environment, relying mainly on bibliographic sources without any real fieldwork and omitting mandatory sections such as a detailed description of the site, an analysis of the impacts on the mangrove forest, and public consultation. This study also contained multiple instances of plagiarism, including references to other countries such as Togo, as well as factual errors and the use of maps of unrelated sites.

The UK government has promised aid money to the project, saying the port will unlock $1 billion in annual trade for DRC and create 85,000 jobs. Rebholz says he can only hope the officials involved are not aware of the disastrous impact the port will have on the coastline and its wildlife. 

DP World has already started dredging the seabed, according to an official source, and plans to build a 600-metre quay, capable of handling the world’s largest ships, on the thin spit of land stretching down to the mouth of the river Congo. This is clearly within the protected boundaries of the park according to the ministerial decree. 

But Rebholz says the managers he met from DP World “weren’t even aware that this port was going to be built within a national park”. Other whistleblowers involved in the negotiations for the port say that environmental studies for the port were botched. 

This coastline is particularly sensitive as the nesting site for endangered leatherback turtles. Rising sea levels and erosion have already consumed almost a quarter of the turtles’ nesting grounds, rangers estimate. Rebholz says the construction of the port will do far worse. “This area will simply be wiped off the map for sea turtles.” 

It is, says Rebholz, yet more evidence of the complete disregard for the international and national laws drawn up to safeguard the area. “The most mind-boggling part of the story of the mangroves park is that there aren’t, in the end, any activities that do not happen in or around it, even though it’s supposed to be under strict protection.”

DP World said that its contract was agreed in full compliance with Congolese laws and that “the allegation of any impropriety is false”.

“We have committed significant resources towards supplemental environmental studies and impact management,” the company said, adding that it had modified the dredging footprint to “avoid direct impact on the Parc Marin des Mangroves”. It added that its “biodiversity plans provide for appropriate monitoring of sensitive species and ecosystems – including turtles – in line with good international industry practice”.  

This year, at least, the sea turtles have returned to lay their eggs. And in a few weeks the park rangers will help the baby turtles back down to the Atlantic ocean where they will swim thousands of miles before returning to lay eggs on the beach where they were born – if it still exists. 

Rebholz looks back on his time at the mangroves park with resolve. “Of course, I regret what happened to my family,” he says. “But I don’t regret the experience. I hope this will have served some purpose.”

After he sent his explosive resignation letter, the US government said Ngumbi and Wilungula would be ineligible for entry to the US “due to their involvement in significant corruption” related to wildlife trafficking. Both deny the allegations and said no evidence had been provided to back them up.

Kabila, meanwhile, has been sentenced to death in absentia on charges of treason and crimes against humanity. The trial, however, was criticised by Human Rights Watch as a “political vendetta”.

Rebholz appears grimly vindicated. “I hope that by denouncing what happened, I can raise awareness of the issues at stake at both a local and international level, so a more responsible vision [for the park] can emerge.“I hope it can contribute to a brighter future.”

*Name changed

With additional reporting from Kuang Keng Kuek Ser and Jelter Meers from the Pulitzer Center

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