TNH has interviewed 13 current and former Mercy Corps staff members - including alleged ringleaders - several other senior UN and aid officials, six complicit business owners, journalists, civil society leaders, and displaced people in reporting trips to Minova and Kalungu.

Business owners, who played a key role in the fraud, gave Mercy Corps investigators the names of nine other aid agencies - in addition to Mercy Corps and the Danish Refugee Council, which said it had launched an internal review but provided few details - allegedly affected by the same scheme, in some cases providing details of complicit aid workers and timelines of their involvement.

Following the discovery of fraud within Mercy Corps' programmes, however, aid agencies did join forces to launch an anti-fraud taskforce and commissioned an operational review - backed with a £200,000 grant from the UK's government aid agency, DFID, which funded RRMP until it was brought to a close last year - examining the integrity of humanitarian assistance in Congo.

A 70-page draft version, circulated among aid groups last month and seen by TNH, does not take a position on the findings of the Mercy Corps investigation, but it does describe many of the same schemes: exaggerated reports of displacements, collusion between aid workers and local communities, and distributions of aid to ineligible beneficiaries.

A 'particularly striking' scale of alleged collaboration and collusion

In its investigation, Mercy Corps, one of the larger aid operators in eastern Congo, interviewed more than 220 staff members, business owners, local leaders, beneficiaries, and members of militia groups who provided corroborating details about the fraud scheme.