NEW YORK – America Mineral Fields, a small Arkansas mining company headquartered in Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, is the first major beneficiary of the imminent fall of the Zaire government headed by Mobutu Sese Seko.
With rebel troops closing in on Kinshasa, Zaire’s capital city, huge international companies such as South Africa’s Anglo-American, DeBeers, BHP and Phelps Dodge have been scrambling to gain favor with the insurgents headed by Laurent Kabila. Kabila’s forces have seized two-thirds of Zaire, including the mineral-rich and diamond-producing areas. But America Mineral Fields has already beat the major companies to the finish line, snagging large contracts for mineral development and diamond trading from the rebel Zairian government.
The obscure AMF was created just two years ago, according to its prospectus, for “the acquisition and development of world-class mineral deposits.” In mid-April, Zairian rebel leader and one-time Maoist guerrilla Kabila signed a $1 billion agreement with AMF, giving the firm exclusive rights to explore and develop an area the size of Switzerland in southeastern Zaire.
As part of the agreement, AMF has promised to invest
$885 million to develop two mining operations. Nearly $600 million will be spent at Kupishi to restore a zinc mining operation there and another $305 million will be allocated to a Kolwezi cobalt mining project. Not bad for an Arkansas company still not listed in the local phone directory and headquartered in a small community whose main employer is a local chicken-processing plant. “It’s going to take a billion dollars … to bring the Kupishi mine and Kolwezi tailings and our exploration area into proper production,” Earl Young, a spokesman for AMF, told the Tribune-Review. The expenditures are judicious, Young explained, because AMF estimates that the Kupishi mine has $4.5 billion in mineral deposits, dwarfed by Kolwezi with a $16 billion worth. These figures don’t include the untold wealth under the chunk of Zaire over which AMF has exclusive exploration rights.
Already, investor interest has spiked the stock price of the publicly traded company (Symbol AMZ, Toronto Exchange, in the U.S. trades on the Pink Sheets, AFYNF) which has risen more than 100 percent in the past two weeks – from about $3 a share before the agreement was signed, to more than $7 a share. Young said the company expects the share price to go even higher as Kabila’s government solidifies its power.
A recent financial statement shows that AMF has a capitalization of about $37 million and has promised to raise the $1 billion necessary to begin development of its two Zaire mines. On Tuesday, company officials returned to the United States after a four-day trip to Zaire with 35 investment bankers, newsletter writers and U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia Democrat.
It was an impressive group for a fledgling company, and according to Young, included representatives from leading investment banks, including SBC Warburg and Dutsch Morgan Grenfell, the biggest bank outside of Japan. Asked if President Clinton has any association with fellow Hope native Mike McMurrough, AMF’s chief executive and chairman, Young said, “No. (Mike’s) probably 10 years older than Bill. I say, know him, yeah, in a small town like Hope, they are bound to know each other.”
He quickly added: “If the question would go further, it would be: Does Bill Clinton own any stock, does Hillary, do we use the same law firms? We don’t know of any stock that he owns, and we don’t use the same law firms.”
News about the AMF agreement with Kabila has been largely relegated to the financial press here, and little has been made about the Hope, Ark., connection. Hope, the tiny rural town where Clinton was born, is located just 30 miles from the Texas border. Although Clinton left Hope at the age of 7 with his widowed mother, his ties there have remained strong and some of his closest associates hailed from Hope, including former White House chief of staff Mack McLarty, former White House administration chief David Watkins, and the late White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster.
While the American press has ignored the AMF-Arkansas connection, the foreign press hasn’t. The Italian paper Corriere della Sera described AMF’s link with Clinton’s home state of Arkansas as a “wicked coincidence.”
Young said the firm, which has been operating in Zaire for the past two years, did not receive any assistance from the U.S. government. The company’s success was the result of the experienced management team running AMF, he said, headed up by McMurrough and Jean Raymond Boulle.
McMurrough, a land surveyor, first met Boulle when they were both exploring for diamonds in Arkansas. Both were later principals of Diamond Fields Resources. With 40 percent of AMF’s outstanding stock, Boulle is AMF’s largest shareholder. Boulle holds no official office with AMF but remains the firm’s guiding force. His younger brother, Max, is an AMF director and active in the company’s operations. Both brothers, in their forties and French-speaking, were born in Mauritius, the mountainous island nation off the west coast of Africa. Both hold British citizenships.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jean Boulle lives in Monaco. He is a seasoned hand at mineral exploration. In the late 1960s, Boulle was the chief diamond buyer for DeBeers, the giant South African firm whose cartel has controlled the diamond trade for decades.
Years later, Boulle found his way to Arkansas and his connections there have helped to make him fabulously wealthy. According to the Houston Chronicle, a company run by Boulle and McMurrough joined a partnership of several companies called the Arkansas Diamond Development Co. in 1988 to develop diamond operations on state-owned lands. Arkansas is believed to have significant deposits of diamonds.
In 1972, the diamond-rich area of southwest Arkansas was purchased by the state and named Crater of Diamonds State Park, preventing private companies from mining the area. In 1986, then-Gov. Clinton appointed a commission to study the feasibility of allowing commercial operations in the park. In 1989, Clinton, despite strong opposition from environmentalists, gave Boulle’s mining company the green light to begin testing of the site.
The Chronicle reported in 1994 that Arkansas Diamond Development Co. is a “partnership that includes Exdiam of Dallas, Sunshine Mining Co. of Boise, and a private Arkansas corporation controlled by Stephens Inc., the powerful Little Rock-based investment house.” Stephens Inc. is the largest financial house outside of Wall Street and consistently backed Clinton in his campaigns for governor and his 1992 presidential run. Stephens Inc. spokesman Frank Thomas said Stephens “was or is involved with a joint venture with Jean Raymond Boulle in … Arkansas Diamond Development … That joint venture is about to draw to a close because they, so far, have not turned up anything worth mining.”
Though Crater State Park appears to have been a failed venture for Boulle and Stephens Inc., Boulle’s Diamond Fields Resources hit the jackpot in Voisey’s Bay, Labrador, when Boulle discovered one of Canada’s largest deposits of nickel, a key ingredient for stainless steel.
In 1996, Diamond Fields Resources and its vast nickel holdings were sold to INCO, Ltd., an Indonesian firm based in Jakarta, for $4 billion in Canadian money. Thomas said “Stephens is not at all involved in America Mineral Fields.”
AMF spokesman Earl Young said Stephens Inc. has no connection with AMF or its Zaire operations, though it did play a significant role in Boulle’s Diamond Fields and was “definitely” a major investor. “I don’t think we had an inside track (with Kabila’s new government), we were just aggressively perceptive,” Young said in explaining his firm’s meteoric rise in Africa.
Mobutu’s 32-year reign could come to an abrupt end within days, and with it one of the United States’ closest Cold War allies. Zaire was considered vital because of its proven mineral deposits of copper, zinc, diamonds, manganese, gold, silver and iron. It is also believed to have vast, but unproven reserves of petroleum.
Some of Zaire’s natural resources were critical for U.S. military needs, such as cobalt. This light, strong metal is necessary for building jet aircraft and space vehicles. Holding a strategic position in Central Africa, U.S. policymakers saw Zaire as important in stopping the spread of communism, as well as helping to support anti-communist insurgents in neighboring Angola. ” Mobutuism is about to become a creature of history,” White House press secretary Mike McCurry announced at an early-April press conference. McCurry called on Mobutu to resign.
Press reports have suggested that the success of Kabila was the result of Mobutu’s corruption – though his regime is not atypical for Africa. Other reports indicate Kabila had been supported in his insurgency by Ugandan strong man Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame.
Mobutu had become isolated and his importance diminished after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But rumors continue to swirl that the Clinton administration had been secretly arming Kabila’s forces. In April of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported on possible U.S. government support for the rebels using neighboring Burundi as a conduit for arms. The Journal detailed the account of a South African pilot who claims that last September he flew a cargo load of assault rifles from South Africa to Burundi’s capital. Once in Burundi, the pilot was greeted by a Burundi officer and a U.S. embassy official. The Journal reported, “The weapons, the pilot said, were destined for Uvira, just across Burundi’s border in Zaire, the birthplace of Mr. Kabila’s revolt.”
Young says his firm has not been aided at all by the U.S. government, but by personal relationships with Kabila’s inner circle. He said Kabila’s key military adviser, retired Belgian Gen. Willy Mallants, acted as the go-between for AMF and made the appropriate introductions. “(Mallants) took our people into Goma (Kabila’s capital). We told Kabila our situation,” Young recounted. “The situation was, we were dealing with the Mobutu government for some time. It was not producing results as rapidly as we liked. Also, if in fact we were on the wrong side, we wanted to change sides. We are business people, not politicians. We just need to know what the rules are and it looks like President Kabila is going to be making the rules.”
Since then the relationship between Kabila and AMF has flourished. AMF has promised to fund the new government through licensing fees. As a measure of goodwill, AMF has put its corporate jet at the disposal of Kabila, who already has taken one trip to South Africa. In addition to AMF’s agreement, another company controlled by Jean Raymond Boulle, America Diamond Buyers, paid $25,000 (the fee under the Mobutu regime had been $150,000) and received the first diamond trading license from the new government. Christopher Ruddy is an associate of WorldNetDaily.com and author of “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster.”
