Oskar Lewnowski’s $9 billion Congo bet to break China’s grip

Oskar Lewnowski is not a name that appears in many newspaper profiles. He does not court attention, does not do television rounds and, until recently, had never sat for a podcast interview despite running what is now the largest specialist mining investment firm on the planet. That deliberate obscurity suited him. The metals world is small, the deals are complex and the edge belongs to those who know more than they say.

But the deal he is now pursuing in the Democratic Republic of Congo is too large to stay quiet about. In February 2026, the consortium he leads signed a non-binding agreement to acquire a 40% stake in two of the most strategically significant copper and cobalt mines on earth, assets owned by commodities giant Glencore and valued together at roughly $9 billion. The U.S. government is backing him. Abu Dhabi sovereign capital is in the consortium. And the minerals at stake, cobalt and copper pulled from the red earth of the DRC’s Lualaba province, sit at the center of the geopolitical competition that will define the next 30 years.

China controls approximately 80% of global cobalt refining capacity. It has spent the better part of two decades quietly securing mining rights, processing infrastructure and offtake agreements across Central Africa while Washington was focused elsewhere. The result is a supply chain vulnerability that cuts across electric vehicles, advanced defense electronics and the entire stack of renewable energy technology. Every battery in every American-made weapon system or electric grid storage unit traces a supply chain that, more often than not, runs through Chinese-controlled processing facilities.

Lewnowski has been arguing for years that this was going to become a crisis. He compared the coming metals supply crunch to the oil shocks of the 1970s and called on governments to intervene the way they created strategic petroleum reserves after the Arab oil embargo. Washington eventually listened. What it found was a 59-year-old son of a fund manager who had spent three decades learning the metals industry from trading desks in Frankfurt and London to mine gates in West Africa and South America, and who had built a firm uniquely positioned to do what no government agency could do alone.

From Deutsche Bank to the World’s Biggest Mining Firm

Before Lewnowski built any of this, he was a vice president at Credit Suisse First Boston in London, helping growth companies prepare for public markets. Before that, he was at Deutsche Bank in New York and Frankfurt, working in trading and mergers through the early 1990s. He was disciplined, technically fluent and drawn to commodities in a way that paper assets never quite satisfied.

He moved to Varomet Ltd., a metals processor formed from assets purchased out of Enron’s collapsed empire, where he oversaw seven acquisitions and divestitures totaling more than $130 million and managed offtake agreements with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion. It was unglamorous by Wall Street standards but formative in the deepest sense. He was learning how metals actually move through the world: who produces them, who ships them, who buys them and who gets cut off when supply tightens.

That education led him to Red Kite Group, which he co-founded around 2004 alongside Michael Farmer and David Lilley. Red Kite in its heyday was the largest metals trading hedge fund in the world, notching returns as high as 188% in a single year during the commodity supercycle of the early 2000s. It was a remarkable run. But even as Farmer and Lilley thrived on the trading side, Lewnowski wanted something different. He wanted to focus on the mine-building side of things, which put him on a different trajectory from his partners almost from the beginning.

The split came in September 2013. Red Kite’s three founders separated their business, spinning off a $1.1 billion mine finance fund under Lewnowski. He renamed it Orion Mine Finance Fund I, set up headquarters in New York and started over with a fund, a thesis and a conviction that the world was going to need far more metal than anyone was building capacity to supply.

Building Orion: A Decade of Patient Capital

What Lewnowski built over the next decade was not a traditional hedge fund chasing short-term volatility. It was a full-spectrum investment platform covering every angle of the mining sector. Over the past decade, he created more than $10 billion in investment value, deploying capital to more than 80 mining portfolio companies across 29 countries.

Orion grew beyond its mine finance origins. Lewnowski added a hedge fund dedicated to metals futures and options, a royalty and streaming business generating long-term cash flows across agricultural and specialty metals, a deep-tech venture capital arm focused on mine sustainability and a long-only public equities fund. Each product was built to interlock with the others. Physical trading informs the investment side. Mine finance deals produce offtake that feeds the trading desk. The entire machine runs on the same commodity intelligence.

Lewnowski has spoken openly about backing mines that ran into serious trouble and timelines that fell apart. He compares the job to Mike Tyson’s famous line: you always have a plan until you get punched in the mouth. That disposition, frank about failure and unsentimental about setbacks, is part of what shaped Orion into a firm with genuine institutional discipline. U.S. pension funds and sovereign wealth funds make up the bulk of his investor base. By 2025, Orion had approximately $8 billion in assets under management and was the largest specialist mining investor on the planet.

Washington Comes Calling: The Critical Minerals Consortium

The moment Lewnowski had been arguing for publicly arrived in 2025. In October of that year, he founded the Orion Critical Minerals Consortium alongside ADQ, an Abu Dhabi sovereign investor, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, with a $5 billion target to construct supply chains for critical materials from emerging market sources. Initial commitments from all three partners reached $1.8 billion. The DFC described it as the largest initiative to create secure supply chains for critical minerals for the United States and its allies.

DFC CEO Ben Black said securing critical minerals was a paramount matter of U.S. strategic interest and that the consortium was created to establish a robust pipeline of secure critical mineral investments vital to advancing American economic prosperity. The DFC, established in 2019 with bipartisan support under President Trump’s first term, is the international investment arm of the U.S. government, mobilizing private capital to advance foreign policy and national security objectives.

The consortium’s mandate is deliberately practical. It focuses on existing or near-term producing assets rather than early-stage exploration projects that could take a decade to become operational. That distinction matters enormously. Washington needed results measurable in years, not decades.

The Congo Play: Cobalt, Copper and China’s Shadow

The first and most consequential test of that mandate is taking shape in the DRC. Orion CMC and Glencore announced in February 2026 that they had entered a non-binding memorandum of understanding for Orion CMC to acquire a 40% stake in Glencore’s DRC assets, Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company, at a combined enterprise value of roughly $9 billion.

These are not marginal deposits. The Mutanda and Kamoto mines produced 247,800 tonnes of copper and 35,100 tonnes of cobalt in 2025, representing roughly 30% of Glencore’s total global copper output. Cobalt is the linchpin mineral in electric vehicle batteries, advanced defense electronics and renewable energy storage. What Lewnowski is pursuing in the Congo is not merely a financial transaction. It is a direct counter-position to Beijing’s decade-long strategy of locking up critical mineral supply chains before Western governments understood what was at stake.

Under the proposed deal, Orion CMC would have the right to appoint non-executive directors to the assets and direct the sale of the relevant share of production to nominated buyers, in accordance with the U.S.-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement. DFC CEO Ben Black said the potential investment would reflect the growing relationship between the U.S. and the DRC and help secure a reliable source of critical minerals for the United States and its partners. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau stated publicly that Washington was fully committed to the arrangement.

The deal remains subject to due diligence and regulatory approvals. One unresolved complication involves the sanctioned royalty interests of Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, whose royalty streams on both mines created a Treasury Department hurdle the consortium has yet to clear. That question sits with Washington policymakers. What is not in question is Lewnowski’s standing to pursue it. He spent 30 years building toward this moment, from trading desks in Frankfurt to mine gates across four continents, accumulating the kind of credibility that made him the private sector partner Washington eventually chose. That choice was not accidental. It was earned.