The U.S. government finally acknowledged Friday it cannot determine which refiners and smelters around the world are financially fueling violence in the war-torn Congo region.
The Commerce Department published a list of more than 400 sites from Australia to Brazil and Canada, but said it "does not have the ability to distinguish" which are being used to fund militia groups.
Reuters
Artisanal gold miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The department missed its original January 2013 deadline, under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, to list "all known conflict mineral processing facilities world-wide." In June, the Government Accountability Office blasted the department for the delay, which the Commerce Department has blamed on the time required to track artisanal miners in eastern Congo that smelt small amounts of these metals, and locating guerrilla operations where makeshift smelters process metals to ship overseas.
The vast majority of the sites on the department's list are small operators, although it also includes a handful of larger corporations such as U.S.-based Asarco Inc. and Germany's H.C. Starck Group. Many of the firms on the list have already been certified as conflict-free.
The inconclusive report underscores the challenges faced by hundreds of U.S. public companies that also had to comply with the rule and file reports on their efforts to discover conflict minerals in their supply chains by June 2.
