Ministry to evaluate impact of Indian businessman’s death on forest holdings here
The Ministry of Natural Resources is to receive a report on the possible implications here of the death of Indian business magnate V. G. Siddhartha who is the owner of Vaitarna Holdings Private Inc. (VPHI), which controls forest concessions amounting to 737,814 hectares.
This is according to Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman when contacted by this newspaper for a comment.
“On Tuesday, Chairperson of the GFC, Jocelyn Dow and I discussed this matter with a view to seeing what, if any, are the implications. It was decided that GFC would gather as much information and provide a report shortly,” Trotman told Stabroek News yesterday.
According to reports in the Indian media, Siddhartha’s body was found on Tuesday, more than a day after he went missing under suspicious circumstances.
He went missing from the Netravati dam site in Karnataka on Monday evening and his body was recovered 36 hours later at around 6:50 am local time by local fishermen. A note allegedly written by the businessman was found on Tuesday and appeared to suggest his death was a suicide. In the note he appeared to lament his failure to create the right business model after 37 years.
Business Today, an Indian news site, has reported that his driver told police that the businessman got off from his car near a bridge in Kotekar on the Netravati River near Mangalore around 6.30 pm on Monday and did not come back. He tried to look for Siddhartha an hour later but could not find him.
Café Coffee Day (CCD), through its Dark Forest subsidiary, in 2010 acquired the State Forest Exploratory Permit for 391,853 hectares of forest originally awarded in 2007 to USbased Simon and Shock International Logging Incorporated (SSILI), after buying out SSILI. Subsequently, Dark Forest acquired the 345,961 hectares concession which was originally assigned to Caribbean Resources Limited (CRL). The acquisitions by the Indian company had sparked concerns about transparency and other matters.
The company had been harvesting and exporting logs and there had been controversy about whether it was abiding with value-added obligations.
Siddhartha had said in 2012 that a processing centre for logs would be set up here but the main facility would be in India.
There had been concern about the company’s failure to fulfill promised value-added production but up to last year, the Ministry of Natural Resources said it was satisfied that VHPI had started “value added initiatives.” It had also said that the company was looking to ramp up lumber production. It is unclear whether this occurred.