After a year of stalled negotiations and two collapsed acquisition attempts, Canadian mining firm Allied Gold has finalized a nearly $300 million strategic investment deal that gives China’s Zijin Gold International a 9.2% minority stake in the company’s global mining assets. The agreement marks the conclusion of a high-stakes corporate saga that has intertwined global mining interests, geopolitical competition, and the ongoing civil conflict in Sudan, raising urgent questions about unregulated gold financing of armed groups.
Under the terms of the deal, Zijin Gold, which counts three major Chinese state-owned entities among its top shareholders and counts the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) as a top 10 shareholder since 2022, gains partial ownership of Allied Gold’s portfolio spanning Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and the contentious 1,600-square-kilometer Kurmuk mining concession in western Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region.
The timing and location of the deal have drawn sharp scrutiny: the agreement was announced the same day last week that mass graves attributed to killings by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were discovered in the Sudanese town of Kurmuk, located just 20 kilometers from the concession border. The Benishangul-Gumuz region has long grappled with internal displacement, low-intensity conflict, and widespread unregulated informal gold mining, and it already hosts Ethiopian military bases that the UN and independent investigators confirm are used to support the RSF, the paramilitary group that has been at war with Sudan’s legitimate national armed forces since April 2023. The concession is also just 100 kilometers from Ethiopia’s strategically critical Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile, and roughly 60 kilometers from a documented UAE-Ethiopian logistics hub in Asosa that is used to train and arm RSF fighters.
The deal closes a turbulent 12-month period for Allied Gold, which saw two prior acquisition attempts fall through. First, a $500 million deal to sell a 50% stake in its assets to Ambrosia, a little-known Emirati firm linked to prominent Abu Dhabi business leader Ahmed Amer al-Amry, collapsed earlier this year after the deal failed to meet required conditions amid a surge in global gold prices. Then, a planned $4 billion full acquisition of Allied Gold by Zijin was scrapped earlier this year after the transaction failed to secure required regulatory approval from Chinese authorities. Negotiators pivoted to a minority stake transaction after the full buyout fell apart, and Allied Gold CEO Peter Marrone has publicly left the door open to additional stake sales to outside investors if offers meet the company’s valuation expectations.
Allied Gold has expressed optimism about its expansion plans, announcing that it expects to launch commercial mining operations at the Kurmuk site in August, with projected annual output of 240,000 to 270,000 ounces of gold by 2027 — a volume valued at roughly $1 billion at current market prices. The company says it will use the proceeds from the latest stake sale to fund operational expansion and ramp-up activities across all three of its core mining projects, including the Kurmuk concession.
However, the transaction has sparked significant controversy over potential links to RSF financing and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Sudan. For years, independent researchers and United Nations investigators have documented that the UAE, a key backer of the RSF, is the primary global transit hub for illegally smuggled conflict gold from Sudan. The RSF operates its own gold trading firm, al-Junaid, and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue by smuggling gold out of Sudanese territory under its control to Dubai, money that is then used to fund weapons purchases and military operations. Industry experts confirm that roughly 85% to 90% of Sudan’s gold production comes from small-scale artisanal miners, and most of this gold is ultimately smuggled to the UAE via private traders.
Ethiopia, which hosts the Kurmuk concession, is also the UAE’s main source of official gold exports, and both Addis Ababa and Abu Dhabi have repeatedly denied accusations that they support the RSF and fuel the Sudan conflict. The UN has documented that the RSF has carried out widespread massacres, sexual violence, and ethnic cleansing against non-Arab civilian communities, acts that UN independent investigators have classified as genocide. More than three years of conflict have displaced over 9 million people and created what UN officials describe as the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the globe.
China officially maintains a stance of neutrality in the Sudan civil war, but investigators have documented that the UAE has transferred sophisticated Chinese-made weapons including heavy artillery, machine guns, and armed drones to the RSF in violation of a UN arms embargo, and Beijing has taken no concrete action to stop the flow of its weapons to the paramilitary group despite repeated requests from Sudan’s recognized government.
When Middle East Eye reached out to Allied Gold, Zijin Gold, and relevant government stakeholders to ask whether the companies would take steps to prevent gold from the Kurmuk concession from being diverted to fund RSF activities, none of the parties provided an on-the-record response. Ethiopian Mines Minister has publicly welcomed expanded foreign investment in the country’s gold, critical mineral, petroleum, and fertilizer sectors, framing new mining deals as a boost to national economic development.
Analysts warn that the joint Chinese-Emirati presence in the strategically located Kurmuk mine could provide a new, formal source of revenue for the RSF, given the site’s proximity to RSF logistics hubs and the Sudanese war front. The development also extends a pattern of controversial foreign mining activity in conflict-affected East Africa: Canadian mining firms have a well-documented history of pursuing extractive projects amid active conflict in the region, including during the 2020–2022 Tigray war in Ethiopia that killed hundreds of thousands of people.