Chinese entrepreneurs paid millions to company that bribed officials
Two Chinese entrepreneurs paid millions of dollars to a Brazilian company that bribed environment officials of an Amazon state to illegally export precious hardwoods to China.
But in a rare success against rising deforestation in the Amazon, Brazilian police and prosecutors were able to stop the scheme before exports started in earnest and said they saved the state from US$30 million worth of potential environmental damage.
Last week prosecutors presented details of two connected, year-long operations that have seen 31 people charged, including the two Chinese entrepreneurs, Brazilian businessmen, environment officials and the former head of the environmental licensing institute of the state of Amapa, on the eastern edge of the Brazilian Amazon.
They said that two Chinese citizens, businessman Xiaoliang Xu and his associate, interpreter and fellow investor Xie Ping had paid Brazilian company Pangea Mineraçao (Pangea Mining) $3 million of $15 million agreed for 50,000 square metres of wood.
“There were Chinese investors who wanted to extract wood in large quantity from Brazil. They made contact with loggers,” said Everton Aguiar, a federal prosecutor in Amapa’s state capital, Macapa. “They were putting a scheme together and it was defeated.”
Police became interested in the company after an anonymous tip off and began monitoring it.
According to prosecutors, Pangea used another company, Ordena Brasil, to bribe officials from the Amapa Institute of the Environment and Territorial Planning (Imap, in its Portuguese acronym) to issue “forest replacement credits” that are issued to farmers who sustainably harvest wood by replanting deforested areas.
