Money Logging: On the Trail of the Asian Timber Mafia
Lukas Straumann
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 3905252686
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Money Logging investigates what Gordon Brown has called probably the biggest environmental crime of our times the massive destruction of the Borneo rainforest by Malaysian loggers. Historian and campaigner Lukas Straumann goes in search not only of the lost forests and the people who used to call them home, but also the network of criminals who have earned billions through illegal timber sales and corruption. Straumann singles out Abdul Taib Mahmud, current governor of the Malay¬sian state of Sarawak, as the kingpin of this Asian timber mafia. Taib s family with the complicity of global financial institutions have profited to the tune of 15 billion US dollars. Money Logging is a story of a people who have lost their ancient paradise to a wasteland of oil palm plantations, pollution, and corruption and how they hope to take it back. Translated from German.
his puppets, he will succeed in making Sarawak a colony of Malaysia, then Tunku is suffering from a terrible illusion.”27 In early September 1966, the Kuching High Court found in favour of Stephen Kalong Ningkan and ruled that his dismissal had been unconstitutional. Reinstated, Ningkan declared all government decisions taken since his dismissal null and void. He called a general election. For Sarawak to have so much independence was going too far for Kuala Lumpur. In the escalating power
they were supported by the Taib government and the police. No one was interested in our rights.” That was the time when Joe Jengau Mela, a Penan from the Upper Baram, became one of the leading personalities in the resistance to the loggers. After attending a primary school run by Australian missionaries belonging to the Borneo Evangelical Mission, he successfully completed the state secondary school in the 1970s. Like many young Penan, his first job on leaving school was as a guard for a timber
the anti-corruption and judicial authorities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Switzerland.11 There are substantial grounds for suspecting that in just two years—2006 and 2007—more than 90 million US dollars in kickbacks from the Malaysian trade in tropical timber flowed through accounts held at the UBS in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Zurich.12 That is probably only the tip of the iceberg. The complex transactions involved not only UBS but also the British HSBC and the Singapore OCBC Bank. On the basis of
refused to accept his dubious monies. The bank claims that it reported Musa’s dodgy businesses to �several countries’ anti-money-laundering authorities in 2008 but it is obvious that for the two previous years, UBS had done nothing about it.18 That was to come back to haunt the big Swiss bank during the Swiss criminal investigation later on, especially since at that time it was also �involved in the global manipulation of the Libor rate and illegal transactions in both the USA and France. By
Politically Exposed �Persons (PEPs) from Sarawak, Malaysia (Basel, 2012), 16 ff. 5 Mark Baker, “Tycoon dodges millions in land tax,” The Age, April 28, 2013. 6 Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation (1988), cited from Bruno Manser, Voices from the Rainforest: Testimonies of a Threatened People (Berne, 1992), 280. 7 Ross, Timber Booms, 146. The FAO is still keeping this study �under lock and key and has refused the Bruno Manser Fund’s request to see it. 8 K.S. Jomo et al., Deforesting