The Democratic Republic of Congo's mines ministry said on Friday that CDM, the Chinese-owned copper and cobalt miner, must still pay $6 million in compensation to communities hit by last year's industrial wastewater spill, even though the company has suspended operations, Reuters reported.

Source: Reuters via TradingView

The ministry ordered CDM to pay $2 million each to three affected communities — Kasapa, Kamatete and Kamisepe — near its operation in Lubumbashi, and said the company must also pay a $6.6 million penalty to the state treasury over the incident, according to reports of the ministry's statement. Yaani, the $6 million compensation is about Rs 54 crore, and the $6.6 million penalty is about Rs 59 crore.

CDM — Congo Dongfang International Mining — is a unit of China's Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, one of the world's largest battery-materials producers and a key supplier to the electric-vehicle industry. Congolese authorities suspended CDM for three months after wastewater leaked from a containment basin at its Lubumbashi operation in November 2025, contaminating nearby communities.

A spill that flooded neighbourhoods

AFP's reporting from Lubumbashi described how thousands of cubic metres of reddish water poured out of the Chinese company's site over two days at the beginning of November 2025, flooding houses and roads in the suburbs next to the plant. Residents and civil-society groups told AFP they had suffered for years from contaminated water discharged by the plant, an allegation the company has denied.

Source: AFP via Nordot

CDM told AFP the November flood was caused by the accidental rupture of a retention basin and denied negligence. The outrage over the flooding forced the authorities to suspend the site's activities and appoint an investigative commission — a rare move, AFP noted, in a country where mining companies generally operate with little enforcement.

Congo is the world's largest producer of cobalt and its second-largest producer of copper, metals that sit at the heart of the global battery and electric-vehicle supply chain. The case is being watched as a test of whether Kinshasa will enforce environmental rules against the large Chinese-owned producers that dominate its mining sector.

The mines ministry's position, as reported on Friday, is that suspending operations does not cancel what CDM owes: the compensation to the three communities and the penalty to the treasury still have to be paid. Reuters did not report an immediate response from CDM or Huayou to Friday's statement.

What happens next will turn on whether CDM pays the $6 million and the $6.6 million penalty, repairs the environmental damage around Lubumbashi, and satisfies the conditions set when its operations were suspended for three months.