INDONESIA Pulp giant tied to companies accused of fires
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Despite its denials, one of the world’s biggest paper producers has extensive behind-thescenes ties and significant influence over wood suppliers linked to fires and deforestation that have degraded Indonesia’s stunning natural environment, The Associated Press has found.
Indonesia’s Sinarmas — better known by its international trade name, Asia Pulp & Paper — has insisted in company publications, public events and to the media that most of the companies that supply it with wood are “independent,” not owned by it or in other ways affiliated with it.
But the AP has found links between Sinarmas, its pulp and paper arm and nearly all the 27 plantation companies that it has told the outside world are independent. The company’s apparent aim: to “greenwash” its image for the global market.
The AP reviewed nearly 1,100 pages of corporate records related to the purportedly independent plantation companies, which show they are owned by 10 individuals. Six are employees of the Sinarmas group and two are former employees, one with links to the Widjaja family, which owns Sinarmas. Several work in the finance department of Sinarmas Forestry.
The AP identified the eight by matching biographical details in the documents, including birth dates, to information in social media profiles, news reports, forestry industry documents and other sources.
The ownership of 25 of the 27 suppliers is exercised through layers of shareholding companies that are almost always based in Sinarmas offices and in most cases have Sinarmas employees, ranging from top executives to humble IT workers and accountants, as their directors and commissioners.
An internal Asia Pulp & Paper document seen by AP states it has “significant influence” over an unspecified number of its wood suppliers through the provision of loans, assets and services, long-term wood purchasing agreements and “unusual trading relationships.” The same document still insists these companies are “independent.”
Indonesia is cutting down its rainforests faster than any other country, swelling the profits of a handful of paper and palm oil conglomerates while causing massive social and environmental problems. The rapid forest loss combined with its greenhouse gas emissions has made Indonesia the fourth biggest contributor to global warming after China, U.S. and India.
Its emissions swelled dramatically in 2015 when record dry season fires burned 10,000 square miles. The fires blanketed much of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and southern Thailand in health-damaging haze that a Harvard and Columbia study estimated hastened 100,000 deaths in the region.