Criminal syndicates are earning more than US$10 billion a year from a booming environmental crime business in rainforest logging, the trade in endangered animal skins and ivory and smuggling canisters of banned gas refrigerants, it is claimed yesterday.

Environmental crime is a growing source of income for international gangs attracted by profit margins of up to 700 percent on illegal items such as tiger skins, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency. Yet the problem is being largely ignored by national and international crime fighting agencies, it says.

The UK-based charity has named several men it suspects of involvement in multimillion-dollar operations that have resulted in extensive environmental destruction, but who have not been successfully prosecuted. They include an Indian, Sansar Chand, who, according to an interrogation report from the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations, has sold more than 12,000 animal skins to Nepal-based traders.

The report says his haul included 400 tigers and 2,000 leopards, worth up to $10 million. Since June 2005 Chand has been in Tis Hazari jail in Delhi.

Abdul Rasyid, an Indonesian businessman, has denied illegal logging of hardwoods such as ramin and balau in the protected Tanjung Puting national park. He was named by the Indonesian government in a list of individuals suspected of involvement in the trade. The country's forestry ministry alleged that he organized the trade in illegal timber, in an operation which the EIA said was overseen from Hong Kong and involved middlemen in Singapore. The case against him has since been dropped for lack of evidence.

According to a signed confession obtained by the Zambia Wildlife Authority, Benson Nkunika admits poaching 38 elephants for their ivory using a range of guns including an AK-47 on the orders of an area warden in South Luangwa, the country's most famous national park.

The EIA believes a network of environmental crime rings is thriving in the developing world, even in the ivory trade, which has been the subject of an international ban since 1989. "It is clear the ivory trade is growing among organized criminals because of the increasing numbers of large seizures we are seeing," said Mary Rice, director of the EIA. "That is reflected in the trade in wild cat skins and illegal logging. Seizures in the 1990s were typically of far smaller volumes."

(China Daily via The Guardian October 15, 2008)