The Rise of Environmental Crime: A Growing Threat to Natural Resources, Peace, Development and Security

Forestry crimes The involvement of transnational organized crime and advanced laundering is becoming more and more evident, even in forest crimes such as rosewood smuggling, illegal logging, or laundering of illegal tropical timber through “fraud” plantations, laundering the timber through paper mills and palmoil plantation front companies. 140 In some countries as much as 90% of forest are leased as logging concessions. 141-142 It is estimated that 62–86% of all suspected illegal tropical wood entering the EU and US arrives in the form of paper, pulp or wood chips, not as roundwood or sawnwood or furniture products, which have received the most attention in the past (see UNEP-INTERPOL, 2014). 143 In 2015, WWF-Germany conducted a follow-up fibre- laboratory investigation of paper to verify possible presence of tropical wood in a total of 144 different paper products. 144 Tropical timber was found in almost 20 percent, despite most of the companies having ruled out this possibility, further confirming the patterns reported by UNEP-INTERPOL in 2014.

UNEP and INTERPOL listed in 2014 some 30 different ways of conducting illegal logging and laundering illegal wood, including 1) Logging in protected areas: 2) Logging without permits in unprotected areas; 3) Illegal logging in conflict zones; 4) Logging in excess of permit or concession quotas; 5) Logging with forged or re-used permits; 6) Obtaining logging permits illegally through bribery; 7) Establishing or expanding palm oil, bio-fuel or other plantations; 8) Cattle ranching and soy production; 9) Widening road corridors, mining or other felling without a permit.

Indeed, corporate crimes have become a key component of forestry crimes. Most crimes involve not the obvious direct illegal logging, but a system of fraud, tax fraud, forged permits or permits acquired through bribes, laundering of illegally procured wood and extensive smuggling operations involving even small fleets of timber vessels operating in Southeast Asia from logging sites to pulp and paper mills abroad. Shell companies, often palmoil or agricultural plantations or grazing (that rarely produce any primary products), are used through multiple temporary shell companies based in tax havens to acquire or lease land for agricultural purposes, but in reality only clearing forests for timber and pulp supply.

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