| schema:articleBody
| - An international aid organisation helping displaced people in eastern DR Congo was the victim of a massive scam by local traders, a humanitarian news agency reported on Thursday. According to The New Humanitarian (TNH), the fraud targeted the non-profit Mercy Corps, one of a number of charities working in North Kivu and South Kivu provinces alongside UN aid agencies. TNH, whose focus is covering humanitarian crises, published the report on its website, on Merchants paid locals $10 (about nine euros) each for their voter cards, which function as an ID, the report said. They then bribed Mercy Corps employees $50 for each name that was added to a list of beneficiaries for cash support, it said. On payment day, "the false beneficiaries -- or someone representing them -- would arrive with their voter cards, take the cash aid or vouchers with a monetary value of $120 on average, and hand it back to the business owners," TNH reported. In this way, the traders pocketed "tens of thousands of dollars between them," it said. "Some $639,000 was lost by Mercy Corps and partners in just a few months," TNH said. The losses included $65,000 by the Danish Refugee Council, it said. A senior Mercy Corps official, who asked not to be named, believed that other aid agencies in the Rapid Response to Population Movement (RRMP) programme "lost around $6 million in around two years," according to the investigation. According to the internal document seen by TNH and AFP, Mercy Corps estimated that 20-30 percent of aid in the form of cash or coupons "may have been diverted." Suspicions first arose in November 2018 when four business owners in the Goma region visited Mercy Corps' local office wanting to pay $20,000 to a woman called Cynthia. In exchange, they wanted hundreds of names to be added to the NGO's database of people receiving emergency aid. "As no-one by the name of Cynthia worked for Mercy Corps," the business owners were "redirected to the group's internal audit department," according to a document seen by both TNH and AFP. The UN children's agency UNICEF has launched a "forensic audit," the agency said. It added that staff members allegedly involved in the scheme were let go by Mercy Corps, "but some now work at other aid organisations". NGOs and UN agencies estimate that 13 million people are in need of humanitarian aid in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a huge country riven by multiple crises, including armed conflict in the east and epidemics of Ebola and coronavirus. The UN refugee agency UNHCR estimates that five million people were forcibly displaced in the country between 2017 and 2019 alone. On Tuesday, the UNHCR warned "massive funding gaps are threatening hundreds of thousands of lives" in the DRC. st/spm/ri/txw
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)