Police have searched several properties in Belgium belonging to family members of Democratic Republic of Congo's President Félix Tshisekedi, as part of an investigation into suspected personal enrichment from the country’s mining sector.
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The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office confirmed that several searches were conducted simultaneously on Wednesday in Brussels and the two provinces surrounding the Belgian capital.
The office referred to a money-laundering complaint filed in July 2025, although the case is broader in scope, involving accusations of corruption, embezzlement and financial offences linked to mining activities.
In early July 2025, several NGOs in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and four former directors of Gécamines, the state-owned mining company, filed a complaint with the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office against members of Tshisekedi’s family.
They accuse them of illegally exploiting mines and plundering mineral resources in Lualaba and Haut-Katanga provinces.
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The complaint was filed in Belgium, as nine of the family members named in the case hold Belgian nationality.
The prosecutor’s office has not identified the people whose properties were searched on Wednesday. The members of the president's family named in the complaint include his wife, mother and brother.
The president himself is not directly implicated in the searches.
'False and defamatory'
The president’s family has rejected the allegations, with lawyers describing them as “entirely unfounded, false and defamatory”.
Jean-Pierre Muteba, spokesperson for the collective that brought the case, alleged that authorities had misappropriated mining waste, known as tailings, and that billions of dollars may have been diverted from the public treasury.
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According to the complaint, any funds found to have been misappropriated should be recovered and used to support the DRC’s development.
The DRC is the world’s top producer of cobalt, a critical mineral used in rechargeable batteries, including those in electric vehicles, but the country’s mining sector has long faced allegations of corruption and a lack of transparency as to how revenues are managed and distributed.