An Open Letter on the 2025 Reuters Report and Its Lasting Effect on Our Company

Boss Mining Solution Ltd, Kigali, Rwanda — 27 July 2026

In July 2025, a Reuters article reported that a then-confidential United Nations Group of Experts document had named our company, Boss Mining Solution Ltd, as a purchaser of coltan sourced from M23-controlled areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That reference was a single sentence, at paragraph 119 of a much longer report. The article that followed did more than repeat, and it stated that the finding made us Rwanda’s “sixth-largest exporter” of the ore that year.

We are writing this letter because a year on, the facts around that story have moved, and the article has not.

A note on how this reporting reached the public

It is worth noting, without speculating on anyone’s motives, that material from Group of Experts reports reaching the press before the Group’s formal report is released to the Security Council is not new to this reporting cycle. Draft or unpublished findings from earlier Group of Experts reports on the Democratic Republic of the Congo have circulated in international media ahead of formal publication before — a pattern documented as far back as 2022, when an unpublished report touching on Rwanda’s alleged role in the DRC was already being reported before the Council had received it. We raise this only to note that the sequence in 2025 — press reporting on a citation from a document that was not yet public — fits a recurring pattern in this area of UN reporting, rather than being something unique to our company.

What has changed

On 2 July 2026, the Group of Experts published its next report on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2026/466. That report examines the same coltan trade from the Rubaya area, over a full subsequent reporting period, in far greater detail than the S/2025/466 report did — at paragraphs 213 to 225, it names a number of Kigali-based exporters in connection with that trade, on the basis of invoices, assaying records, audio recordings and customs data. Boss Mining Solution is not among the companies named there. We take no position on the accuracy of the Group’s findings as they relate to other companies, and nothing in this letter should be read as endorsing or disputing them; our observation is limited to the fact that Boss Mining Solution does not appear. None of the company’s owners has been named in that report, or in any report of the Group, at any point.

No United Nations, United States, United Kingdom or European Union sanctions list has ever included Boss Mining Solution or its owners in connection with this trade, including in sanctions rounds issued after the 2025 report that named other companies over the same conflict.

What we told Reuters before publication, and since

Before the 2025 article was published, we spoke to a Reuters journalist and offered, in writing, to host her and her colleagues at our production facility in Kigali — to meet our team, see our sourcing and our iTSCi-tagged material, and review our export records on the ground. That invitation was declined. We wrote to Reuters again on 14 July 2026, setting out the change of circumstances and asking that the article be updated to reflect it, consistent with Reuters’ own corrections practice. As of this letter, we have not had a substantive reply.

We also wrote directly to the Group of Experts, before and after the 2025 report, setting out our position and our supporting documentation. We received no acknowledgement.

Why a single sentence has been hard to live down

Boss Mining Solution and Novacore are both members in good standing of the iTSCi traceability programme for tin, tantalum and tungsten, which operates against the OECD Due Diligence Guidance and the sourcing requirements that flow from the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act. Every lot we export travels with a full iTSCi document set — a C2 form, exporter and processing sheets, and ICGLR certification — and our supply chain has been audited multiple times under that programme without a suspension or exclusion finding. After the 2025 report, we also commissioned an independent mineralogical study of our sourced material; coltan of Congolese origin is readily distinguishable by its lower niobium oxide content, and our study and our customs and laboratory-certification records are consistent with Rwandan origin.

None of that has been enough to undo the effect of one paragraph carried by one very widely read wire report. A single sentence in a UN document, repeated in international media, has functioned as a permanent flag in compliance screening tools, regardless of what the Group’s own later, more detailed work found. This year that translated into something concrete: a bank that handles our payments notified us that it was uncomfortable with transactions connected to Rwanda and suspended part of our service, citing the same reporting.

Why we are not suing anyone

We want to be candid about a question we are frequently asked: why not simply take Reuters, or the United Nations, to court?

As against the United Nations, the honest answer is that this route is not realistically available. The UN and its subsidiary organs, including groups of experts reporting to the Security Council, enjoy jurisdictional immunity from suit in national courts under Article 105 of the UN Charter and the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, and there is no UN court in which a private party can bring a claim of this kind. That immunity has been tested by claimants with far graver and better-documented harms than ours — the Haitian cholera litigation is the best-known example — and it has held. Commentators on this area of international law have long noted that it leaves affected parties with essentially one avenue: public and diplomatic pressure on the Organization to act voluntarily, rather than a judicial remedy compelling it to do so. We do not expect our case to be an exception, and we are not pursuing one.

As against Reuters, the practical difficulty is different but no less real. The article reports, and attributes to, the Group of Experts’ own findings; a media organisation that accurately reports the existence and content of an official document is on strong ground against a defamation claim in most jurisdictions, whatever the accuracy of the underlying document turns out to be a year later. That is precisely why our approach to Reuters has been a request for a corrections process, not a legal claim — because that is the mechanism that actually exists for a case like ours.

This is the reason for this letter. Where litigation is not a realistic path, the only tools left are transparency and a direct, public request for the record to be brought up to date.

What we are asking for

From Reuters: an appended update to the 2025 article, transmitted through the same wire and licensing channels that carried the original, noting that the Group’s 2026 report does not name Boss Mining Solution among the exporters it identified and that no sanctions action has followed.

From the Group of Experts: written acknowledgement that Boss Mining Solution is not named in S/2026/466, and confirmation of any process by which that can be placed on the record alongside paragraph 119 of S/2025/446.

From our banking and commercial partners: a willingness to look at the full record — both reports, our iTSCi status, and our underlying documentation — before treating a single paragraph from 2025 as the last word.

Where things stand

Our business has continued without interruption, and most of our partners have engaged with us in good faith once they had the fuller picture. We are grateful for that. But we think it is worth saying plainly, in public, what a company in our position learns from this experience: that a single unverified line in a confidential draft can outrun, by a wide margin, the correction that eventually catches up to it — and that the burden of closing that gap falls almost entirely on the company named, not on the institutions that named it. We are raising this not only for ourselves, but because we do not think we are the only company that will find itself in this position.

We remain open to a visit from any journalist, investigator or partner who wishes to see our operation, our records and our traceability documentation directly.

Boss Mining Solution Ltd, Kigali, Rwanda

bossmining12@gmail.com