Travel in the maze of evasion and optimization which cost the continent 50 billion dollars each year, according to the OECD.
Rock, philanthropy and business, the winning trio? For the Irish singer Bob Geldof, Africa is all that at once. If the continent has long been summed up for him in tragedies, it has above all become a territory of "extraordinary business and investment opportunities", according to him. The adventure begins in 1985 when famine rages in Ethiopia. Turned into an activist, the former leader of the Boomtown Rats brings together a handful of rocker friends in July for a charity concert, Live Aid, broadcast on televisions around the world, which brings in 212.5 million dollars (190 million euros) of donations. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him the following year.

But “Sir Bob” will change its rhetoric over the years. Rather than "saving Africa", he worries about "contributing to the economic development" of the continent. To do this, the former rock star co-founded in London in 2012 a “private-equity” fund, 8 Miles, which he chairs without managing it. The rocker aims to invest nearly 224 million dollars in African agribusiness, health, education, real estate and telecommunications companies. And if 8 Miles willingly communicates on the environmental and social virtues of its equity investments - from 15% to 45% in African companies - for a total amount of nearly 150 million dollars, if it insists on its desire to " improve transparency, decision-making and accountability", Bob Geldof's group communicates less about the fact that it operates from Mauritius, an uninhibited platform for "offshore" finance. Mailboxes and shell companies In Port-Louis, capital of this African island in the Indian Ocean, glass towers have grown in recent decades, as quickly as the cane fields have withered, deserted by a youth who have understood that sugar, for a long time the main resource of the country, now only represents
1% of gross domestic product (GDP), compared to 50% for the financial sector.

In the business district, Cyber City, multinationals, African companies and investors from all over the world have mailboxes, shell companies and other virtual headquarters, in the absence of offices and employees. All benefit from the political stability of this Republic of 1.3 million inhabitants with tax advantages and secrecy guaranteed by consulting firms, banks and the government. “Due to its reputation, Mauritius is used by many private equity funds, defends 8 Miles. The African companies in which we invest pay all their taxes in their country
origin on the continent.”

However, according to an exchange of internal emails contained in the "Mauritius Leaks", if the head office of Bob Geldof's fund has been discreetly established in Mauritius, it is still "for tax reasons", between
others. This investigation, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and twenty media partners, including LeMonde, is based on a leak of 200,000 confidential documents from the Mauritian office of the prestigious international law firm, Conyers Dill & Pearman.

Founded in Bermuda in 1928, this firm has established itself as one of the world's specialists in "offshore" finance and worked on the island of Mauritius from 2009 to 2017. Its clients therefore include 8 Miles, but also the giant a Geneva commodity trading company, Trafigura. The multinational resorted to

services of Conyers Dill & Pearman for a 200 million dollar transaction with the Mauritian subsidiary of an Indian company, relating to a delivery of gasoline, in January 2014, or to facilitate payment for the purchase of ferronickel from an Emirati company. To sell Volkswagen brand vehicles in Malawi, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the French distribution group CFAO also asked the firm to create, in May 2014, a subsidiary in Mauritius. As well as the mining group of Kazakh origin, Eurasian Natural Resources Corp., which this same year granted a loan of 30 million dollars to a Mauritian front company operating a coal mine in Mozambique.

Citizenship at 1 million dollars So many legal operations that aim, for the most part, to facilitate and opacity transactions on the continent. While taking advantage of a top-of-the-range service and tax advantages – such as a tax rate on income from foreign companies oscillating between 0% and 3% – offered by the former Dutch colony, then French, before becoming a English possession. Mauritius has become a kind of Luxembourg of Africa, included on the “grey list” of tax havens established by the European Union (EU). To the great displeasure of the economies of the African continent weakened by the evaporation of the income of local and foreign economic operators in the maze of financial circuits. Circuits that often lead to the Indian Ocean island, where an investor can acquire citizenship against 1 million dollars paid to a Mauritian sovereign fund, or a passport, against 500,000 dollars, had indicated, in June 2018, Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, during his presentation of the budget to Parliament.