When President Tshisekedi signed the decree appointing Juan Ted Beleshayi Kasanda as Director General of ARSP on June 3, 2026, he placed at the head of the DRC's subcontracting regulator a man whose professional life has been spent inside the financial architecture of the private sector — and specifically inside the accounts of the companies whose subcontracting obligations ARSP is mandated to enforce. Nearly a decade at KPMG DRC auditing mining, energy, and telecommunications companies. Then the IGF, where public finance inspection sharpened his understanding of how institutions manage — or mismanage — economic obligations. A certified accountant with a degree in monetary macroeconomics from the University of Kisangani.
ARSP's mandate is deceptively simple: ensure that subcontracting markets benefit companies with majority Congolese capital. In practice it has been one of the most contested and unevenly enforced instruments of the DRC's local content framework since 2018. International operators have navigated its requirements with varying degrees of compliance. The regulator has lacked, until now, a director general with the audit depth and financial forensics background to challenge them on their own terrain.
Beleshayi takes office with a clear stated mission and the technical profile to pursue it. Whether the mining, energy, and telecoms operators whose accounts he once audited will find in him a more demanding interlocutor than his predecessor is the question that will define his tenure.
