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20 February 22
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‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment
“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.
In return, the New York Democrat, popularly known as AOC, said: “This is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with dejo.”
Dictionary.com defines pendejo as “a mildly vulgar insult for ‘asshole’ or ‘idiot’ in Spanish”.
“Once again,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “the existence of a wife or daughters doesn’t make a man good. And this one is basura.”
Basura is Spanish for “trash”.
She also accused Carlson of sexual harassment.
Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.
Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.
“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!
“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”
The leading provocateur in Fox News’ evening line-up was discussing a book about Ocasio-Cortez, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, by Lisa Miller, a reporter at New York magazine.
Carlson said Miller’s book was “like a box of Fig Newtons. You know it’s wrong to open it, but the temptation is strong, and so we did.”
As the media watchdog Mediate put it, several of the passages Carlson read were “fawning in nature and weave mundane videos AOC has posted online – such as her assembling Ikea furniture – into a grand narrative about her life”.
In one passage, Carlson said, the congresswoman is described as “pointedly” saying into a camera, “I’m alone today”.
“Is it just us or does that sound like an invitation to a booty call?” Carlson said.
“Maybe one step from ‘What are you wearing?’ Either way it’s a little strange. It’s definitely over-sharing and yet, according to the book, over-sharing is the key to Sandy Cortez’s success.”
Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Remember when the right wing had a meltdown when I suggested they exhibit obsessive impulses around young women? Well now Tucker Carlson is wishing for … this on national TV.
“You’re a creep, bro. If you’re this easy with sexual harassment on air, how are you treating your staff?”
On Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez returned to the subject on Twitter.
Echoing Hillary Clinton, who this week said Fox News was “awfully close to actual malice” in its reporting on her, the Democrat wrote: “I genuinely want to know why Tucker Carlson is allowed/paid to engage in clear, targeted, libelous harassment that endangers people and drives so many violent threats that people have to fundraise for their own safety.
“Why should they have to pay for his harassment? Make it make sense.
“It’s not within the realm of political commentary, and it’s not just me. He regularly targets people that do not have access to resources for protection. Once he gets to fantasizing about ‘booty calls’ of women on national TV I cease to see the political value outside of incitement.”
An Afghan woman begs for money from passing cars in the snow, with her child huddled beside her, on the Kabul road south to Pul-e Alam, Afghanistan, on Jan. 17, 2022. (photo: Scott Peterson/Getty Images)
The administration blamed ongoing 9/11 litigation for delays in sending desperately needed assets back to starving Afghans.
The proceedings are currently under an injunction while more 9/11 families argue they should also have access to the funds, but legal experts say Biden’s broad emergency powers allow him to release the seized funds any time. In fact, Biden was initially forced by a court order in the Taliban lawsuit to make a decision about the assets — which were frozen when the U.S. withdrew from Kabul, despite belonging to the Afghan people and not the Taliban — by February 11.
When news of the split funds first broke last week, it was reported that the half not reserved for ongoing litigation would be channeled through humanitarian groups. That appears not to be settled: The corresponding executive order doesn’t specify, and officials seem undecided on what exactly they want to do with the billions of dollars held in the New York Federal Reserve Bank. For now, the funds are said to be in the process of being diverted to a trust fund “for the benefit of the Afghan people.”
In an interview at the United States Institute for Peace on Tuesday, Thomas West, the State Department’s special representative and deputy assistant secretary for Afghanistan, tacitly confirmed that the administration is still weighing whether to use these funds to provide the Afghan economy with liquidity. He conceded that the consensus opinion he hears from Afghans and experts on the best use of these funds is to channel them toward the “potential recapitalization of a future central bank,” but told moderator Stephen Hadley that officials are “early in [their] discussions” about how to release the funds. A source with knowledge of internal discussions, who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely, confirmed that the administration is considering releasing some of the funds to the Afghan central bank.
But how committed Biden is to using the funds for macroeconomic stability — the lack of which is the driver of the economic collapse — remains an open question. In a separate exchange on Tuesday, the administration again pointed to the court case, this time to justify their slow decision-making. In response to a question about how the administration justifies seizing money from Afghanistan’s federal reserve in the first place, press secretary Jen Psaki claimed the administration was taking a “proactive step” in splitting the assets of the Afghan central bank, which were frozen six months ago.
When prodded by The Intercept to explain how this step was proactive given the remaining uncertainty over when and how these assets will be released, Psaki pointed to the ongoing litigation, telling reporters that “no funds can be transferred until the courts make a ruling” on whether the money should go to the families of some of the victims of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks. She then reiterated that the move was “proactive” because it signals the administration’s intent to eventually get some of the money to the Afghan people “for humanitarian purposes.” (None of the participants in the 9/11 attacks were from Afghanistan; only a small number of victims’ families are participating in the lawsuit.)
This line of reasoning was picked up by the lawyers representing the most prominent group of 9/11 plaintiffs, who used it to press the judge to lift the stay on their purported share of the Afghans’ money. In a filing on Wednesday, a team of lawyers including Lee Wolosky, a recent member of the White House team on Afghanistan, accused the administration of dragging its feet, telling the court that “the sooner [the] proceedings move forward, the sooner [the Afghan central bank] funds may be applied in service of urgent humanitarian needs.”
Afghans are in the throes of a harsh winter, and the administration’s indecision ensures that the liquidity the economy needs to restart is still months away. In a call explaining the decision to split the assets on February 11, a senior administration official explained that it would be “months and months” before any of the assets would be doled out.
The economic crisis has been the topic of increasingly alarming warnings from international human rights organizations. Multiple reports from these organizations have described devastating conditions: individuals selling their organs, families burning their furniture for warmth, and children dying of malnourishment or being sold by parents desperate for basic commodities like food and fuel.
Several international human rights and economics experts within these organizations told The Intercept this week that the administration’s messaging has been inconsistent and their movement toward releasing the assets of the central bank has been slow. According to Graeme Smith, a consultant for the International Crisis Group who testified about the plight of the Afghan people in a Senate hearing last week, the devastation Afghans are experiencing as a result of the delay is difficult to quantify, but the reality, he told The Intercept, is that “people are starving to death — dying quiet, miserable deaths behind mud walls.”
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has continued to push the Biden administration to release Afghanistan’s reserves. In a statement released on Tuesday, they lambasted Biden’s decision to split the Afghan central bank’s assets, saying that “by removing and breaking up Afghanistan’s already frozen funds, the United States is continuing to contribute to a crumbling economy and devastating impacts on the Afghan people.” They dismissed the idea of waiting until litigation over the funds concluded.
Multiple legal experts have also dismissed the idea that the Biden administration needs to wait until the conclusion of litigation to release another country’s foreign reserves. Even Biden’s relatively few defenders in the international human rights community concede that the politics of ongoing litigation are a factor in the administration’s refusal to engage in prompt action to recapitalize Afghanistan’s central bank. In a recent post for the think tank Atlantic Council, Brian O’Toole defended what he described as the administration’s “kabuki theater” on the grounds that a swift release of the bank’s assets, which experts say is well within the administration’s broad authority, would leave the administration “bogged down in years of legal action.”
The longer the United States delays the release of the central bank’s funds, the longer starving Afghans will have to wait for relief. John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept that the next few months will see critical spikes in acute malnutrition. By the end of March, over half of Afghans are expected to face crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity. Both Smith and Sifton pointed to an injection of liquidity into the Afghan economy as the critical move needed to prevent widespread humanitarian disaster. While recapitalizing the existing central bank is not the only option for providing liquidity, experts say it is the quickest route to get money flowing through the economy.
“It’s good that U.S. policymakers are talking about reviving the [Afghan] central bank,” Smith told The Intercept, “but they can’t do it quickly enough.”
Credit Suisse. (image: Doug Chayka/Guardian UK)
Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn) held in one of Switzerland’s best-known financial institutions.
The leak points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds. The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data.
We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world.
They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela’s state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.
One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal.
The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
Credit Suisse said that Switzerland’s strict banking secrecy laws prevented it from commenting on claims relating to individual clients.
“Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations and inferences about the bank’s purported business practices,” the bank said in a statement, arguing that the matters uncovered by reporters are based on “selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”
The bank also said the allegations were largely historical, in some instances dating back to a time when “laws, practices and expectations of financial institutions were very different from where they are now”.
While some accounts in the data were open as far back as the 1940s, more than two-thirds were opened since 2000. Many of those were still open well into the last decade, and a portion remain open today.
The timing of the leak could hardly be worse for Credit Suisse, which has recently been beset by major scandals. Last month, it lost its chairman, António Horta-Osório, after he twice broke Covid-19 regulations.
That capped an unprecedented year of controversies in which the bank became embroiled in the collapse of the supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital and the US hedge fund Archegos Capital, and was fined £350m over its role in a loan scandal in Mozambique.
This month, Credit Suisse became the first major Swiss bank in the country’s history to face criminal charges – which it denies – relating to allegation it helped launder money from the cocaine trade on behalf of the Bulgarian mafia.
However, the repercussions of the leak could be much broader than one bank, threatening a crisis for Switzerland, which retains one of the world’s most secretive banking laws. Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
The Suisse secrets project sheds a rare light on one of the world’s largest financial centres, which has grown used to operating in the shadows. It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
Disgraced executives, fraudsters, traffickers – clients
When Ronald Li Fook-shiu approached a banker to open an account in 2000, he is unlikely to have been viewed as a run-of-the-mill client. A former chairman of the Hong Kong stock exchange, he was one of the wealthiest people in the city, where he was known as the “godfather of the stock market”. But he was perhaps better known for the time he spent in a maximum security prison.
Li’s career had ended in disgrace in 1990, when he was convicted of taking bribes in exchange for listing companies on the stock exchange. However, a decade later Li was nonetheless able to open an account that later held 59m CHF (£26.3m), according to the leak.
He has since died, but his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.
Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.
A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.
Relationship managers were expected to use external sources to verify customers and their risk levels, according to the leak, including news articles or databases such as the Thomson Reuters World-Check platform, which is used widely in the financial services sector to flag when people are arrested, charged, investigated or convicted of a serious crime.
Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić. Radulović’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.
The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.
After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.
However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.
The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.
While Credit Suisse said in its statement it could not comment on any specific clients, the bank said “actions have been taken in line with applicable policies and regulatory requirements at the relevant times, and that related issues have already been addressed”.
In some instances, Credit Suisse is understood to have frozen accounts belonging to problematic clients. Yet questions remain about how quickly the bank moved to close them.
One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.
Sederholm’s crime first came to light in 2009, when police in Manila raided a storefront purporting to be the local chapter of the Mindanao Peoples’ Peace Movement, and discovered about 17 women in cubicles with webcams performing sex shows for foreign customers. He was convicted in 2011.
A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”
Ferdinand and Imelda pillage the Philippines
Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.
The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.
One of the most notorious cases in Credit Suisse’s history involved the corrupt Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda. The couple are estimated to have siphoned as much as $10bn from the Philippines during the three terms Ferdinand was president, which ended in 1986.
It has long been known that Credit Suisse was one of the first banks to help the Marcoses ravage their own country and in one infamous episode even helped them open Swiss accounts under the fake names “William Saunders” and “Jane Ryan”. In 1995, a Zurich court ordered Credit Suisse and another bank to return $500m of stolen funds to the Philippines.
The leaked data contains an account that belonged to Helen Rivilla, an attorney convicted in 1992 for helping launder money on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos. Despite this, she was able to open a Swiss account in 2000, as was her husband, Antonio, who faced similar charges that were subsequently dropped.
It is hard to know how Credit Suisse could have missed the money-laundering case linking the couple to the corrupt Philippine leader, which was reported by the Associated Press. The couple, who could not be reached for comment, were able to hold about 8m CHF (£3.6m) with the bank before their accounts were closed in 2006.
One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”
The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.
Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.
The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.
By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.
Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”
Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.
More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.
This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.
“This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.
The whistleblower acknowledged that the leak would contain accounts that were legitimate and declared by the client to their tax authority.
“I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”
It was not possible for journalists in the Suisse secrets project to establish how many of the more than 18,000 accounts in the leak were declared to relevant tax authorities.
Links to another dictator … and another
Ferdinand Marcos may have been Credit Suisse’s most notorious client. He is arguably rivalled only by relatives of the brutal Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who is believed to have stolen as much as $5bn from his people in just six years. It has long been known that Credit Suisse provided services to Abacha’s sons, opening Swiss accounts in which they deposited $214m.
Credit Suisse was publicly contrite after being kicked off a sustainable investment index over the affair. “We understand that the index was not really happy with us being involved with Abacha – we were not happy ourselves,” a spokesperson said in 1999. “But we have addressed those problems and for several years we have taken internal measures to make sure nothing similar happens in the future.”
Banks that enable kleptocrats to launder their money are complicit in a particularly far-reaching crime. The consequences for already impoverished populations can be devastating, as state coffers are siphoned, basic standards are eroded and trust in democracy plummets.
Politicians and state officials are among the riskiest customers for banks because of their access to public funds, particularly in developing nations with fewer legal safeguards against corruption. Banks and other financial institutions are required to subject politically exposed persons, or PEPs, to the most stringent checks, known as “enhanced due diligence”.
The leaked Credit Suisse data is peppered with politicians and their allies who have been linked to corruption before, during or after they had their accounts. None are as well known as the Marcoses or the Abachas, but several wielded great power in countries from Syria to Madagascar, where they amassed personal fortunes.
They include Pavlo Lazarenko, who served a corrupt single year as prime minister of Ukraine between 1997 and 1998 before applying for an account at Credit Suisse. One month after pressure from rivals forced Lazarenko to announce his resignation, he opened his first of two Credit Suisse accounts. One was later valued at almost 8m CHF (£3.6m).
Lazarenko was later estimated by Transparency International to have looted $200m from the Ukrainian government, allegedly by threatening to harm businesses unless they paid him 50% of their profits. He pleaded guilty to money laundering in Switzerland in 2000, and was later indicted in the US for corruption and sentenced to nine years in prison in 2006 in relation to bribes received from a Ukrainian businessman.
His lawyer said those convictions did not relate to the theft of any money from the people of Ukraine. Lazarenko, who reportedly lives in California, has resisted returning to the country, where he still faces accusations he stole $17m. His lawyer said his Credit Suisse accounts had not been accessed for two decades and were frozen in connection with court proceedings against him.
It remains unclear why Credit Suisse allowed Lazarenko to open an account and deposit such huge sums in the first place, given his background; before entering politics, Lazarenko was a functionary in charge of a collective farm.
Monika Roth, an expert on money laundering and a professor at Lucerne University, said Swiss banks had for a long time struggled to properly challenge politicians and public officials who, after stints in public office on relatively modest salaries, turned up with huge sums to deposit. She said: “Nobody wants to have asked the question: how is that possible?”
Around the time it was doing business with Lazarenko, Credit Suisse appears to have also made inroads into the Egyptian political establishment under the dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was president for three decades until 2011. The bank’s clients included Mubarak’s sons, Alaa and Gamal, who established business empires in Egypt.
The brothers’ relationship with the bank spanned decades, with the earliest joint account opened by the brothers in 1993. By 2010 – the year before the popular revolt that ousted their father – an account belonging to Alaa held 232m CHF (£138m).
After the Arab spring uprisings their fortunes changed, and in 2015 the brothers and their father were sentenced to three years in jail by an Egyptian court for embezzlement and corruption. They say the case was politically motivated, but after an unsuccessful appeal Alaa and Gamal paid an estimated $17.6m to the Egyptian government in a settlement agreement that made no admissions of guilt.
Lawyers for the brothers reject any suggestion they were corrupt, saying their rights were violated during the Egyptian case, and 10 years of wide-ranging and intrusive investigations into their global assets by foreign authorities has not uncovered any legal violations. They added that their Swiss accounts had been frozen for over a decade, pending the resolution of investigations by the Swiss authorities.
Other Credit Suisse clients linked to Hosni Mubarak were the late tycoon Hussein Salem – who acted as a financial consigliere for the dictator for nearly three decades, amassed a fortune through preferred tender deals and died in exile after facing money-laundering charges – and Hisham Talaat Moustafa, a billionaire politician in Mubarak’s party.
Moustafa, who could not be reached for comment, was convicted in 2009 of hiring a hitman to murder his ex-girlfriend, the Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim – but his account was not closed until 2014.
Another Mubarak henchman linked to Credit Suisse’s banking services was his former spy chief Omar Suleiman. His associates are listed in the data as beneficial owners of an account that held 63m CHF (£26m) in 2007. Suleiman was a feared figure in Egypt, where he oversaw widespread torture and human rights abuses.
The data reveals Credit Suisse accounts held by several more intelligence and military figures and their family members, including in Pakistan, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq. One Algerian client was Khaled Nezzar, who served as minister of defence until 1993 and participated in a coup that precipitated a brutal civil war in which the military junta he was part of was accused of disappearances, mass detentions, torture and execution of detainees.
Nezzar’s alleged role in human rights abuses had been widely documented by 2004, when his account was opened. It contained a maximum balance of 2m CHF (£900,000) and remained open until 2013, two years after he was arrested in Switzerland for suspected war crimes. He denies wrongdoing and the investigation is ongoing.
If ordinary Algerians, Egyptians and Ukrainians have reason to complain that Credit Suisse may have aided nefarious leaders, their grievances pale in comparison with Venezuelans.
Reporters working on the Suisse secrets project identified Credit Suisse accounts linked to almost two dozen business people, officials and politicians implicated in corrupt schemes in Venezuela, most of which revolved around the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
“Corruption has always been around in PDVSA, in varying degrees and levels,” said César Mata-Garcia, an academic at the University of Dundee specialising in international petroleum law. “The words ‘Venezuela’, ‘PDVSA’ and ‘oil’ are an alarm bell for banks.”
If so, that does not appear to have stopped Credit Suisse acquiring clients later revealed to be involved in numerous US investigations and prosecutions linked to PDVSA and the looting of the Venezuelan economy.
One case involves two US-based businessmen with Venezuelan connections, Roberto Rincón Fernández and Abraham Shiera Bastidas, who in 2009 set about bribing officials in exchange for lucrative PDVSA contracts with the help of an associate, Fernando Ardila Rueda. Among those who allegedly received bungs were the energy vice-minister, Nervis Villalobos Cárdenas, and a senior PDVSA official, Luis De Léon Perez.
In 2015, US prosecutors began indicting the participants; court papers make repeated reference to payments into accounts in an unnamed Swiss bank. However, the leaked data reveals all five men had Credit Suisse accounts active at the time of the offences. Of the five, four have pleaded guilty. The exception, Villalobos, is resisting extradition to the US from Spain.
Some of the Venezuela-linked Credit Suisse accounts contained enormous sums; Villalobos had as much as 9.5m CHF (£6.3m) in his account and De Léon had as much as 22m (£15.5m). Rincón, the businessman paying their bribes, had more than 68m CHF (£44.2m) in his account as of November 2015, the month prior to his arrest.
‘How many rogue bankers before you become a rogue bank?’
When Credit Suisse’s ornate headquarters were constructed in the 1870s in Zurich, they were designed to symbolise “Switzerland as a financial centre”. More than 150 years later, Credit Suisse occupies the same grand premises and Switzerland remains a global offshore centre, much as it has done for the last 300 years.
It is only in recent decades that Credit Suisse, one of Switzerland’s oldest and most cherished banks, acquired its reputation for calamity. As one commentator observed earlier this week: “The bank boasts that its purpose is to serve its wealthy clients ‘with care and entrepreneurial spirit’, but at this stage most of them would probably be happy if it could just avoid yet another major scandal.”
Horta-Osório lasted less than a year before resigning last month. Shortly after Credit Suisse appointed its new chairman, Axel Lehmann, the bank reported a loss of 1.6bn CHF (£1.3bn) in the fourth quarter, in part because it had put aside more than 400m CHF (£320m) to deal with unspecified “legacy litigation matters”.
And there is no shortage of those. The scandals involving Greensill, Archegos and Mozambique bonds have dogged the bank over the past year.
Over the past three decades, Credit Suisse has faced at least a dozen penalties and sanctions for offences involving tax evasion, money laundering, the deliberate violation of US sanctions and frauds carried out against its own customers that span multiple decades and jurisdictions. In total, it has racked up more than $4.2bn in fines or settlements.
That includes the $2.6bn the Swiss bank agreed to pay US authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion in 2014; the $536m it was fined by the US five years before for deliberately circumventing US sanctions against countries including Iran and Sudan in 2009, and other payouts to Germany and Italy over tax evasion allegations.
Against this backdrop, the Suisse secrets revelations may fuel questions over whether Credit Suisse’s challenges are indicative of a deep malaise at the bank.
Jeff Neiman, a Florida-based attorney who represents a number of Credit Suisse whistleblowers, believes the sheer number of scandals involving the bank indicates a deeper problem.
“The bank likes to say it’s just rogue bankers. But how many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?” he said. Neiman alleges there has been a culture at the bank “which encourages its bankers probably from the top down to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, bury their heads in the sand on a good day, and on many days, actively assist folks to skirt whatever the law may be in order to best protect assets under management”.”
Such allegations are strongly rejected by Credit Suisse. “In line with financial reforms across the sector and in Switzerland, Credit Suisse has taken a series of significant additional measures over the last decade, including considerable further investments in combating financial crime,” the bank said in its statement, adding that it upheld “the highest standards of conduct”.
Its lawyers said it had fully cooperated with many of the investigations cited by the Guardian and that any past individual failings by the bank did not reflect its current business policies, practices or culture. In November, it announced it would put “risk management at the very core of the bank”.
The bank said its “preliminary review” of the accounts flagged by the Suisse secrets reporting project had established that more than 90% of those reviewed were now closed or “were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries”. Of the remaining accounts, which remain active, the bank said it was “comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other control-related steps were taken, including pending account closures”.
The Credit Suisse statement added: “These media allegations appear to be a concerted effort to discredit the bank and the Swiss financial marketplace, which has undergone significant changes over the last several years.”
The debate over whether Switzerland’s banking industry has undergone sufficient reforms is likely to be renewed in light of the leak. The whistleblower who shared the data suggested that banks alone should not be blamed for the state of affairs, as they are “simply being good capitalists by maximising profits within the legal framework they operate in”.
“Simply put, Swiss legislators are responsible for enabling financial crimes and – by virtue of their direct democracy – the Swiss people have the power to do something about it. While I am aware that banking secrecy laws are partly responsible for the Swiss economic success story, it is my strong opinion that such a wealthy country should be able to afford a conscience.”
Hanien supports women in Malta, where abortion is a criminal offense. (photo: Cliona O'Flaherty/Guardian UK)
With reproductive rights being increasingly restricted in Europe, people are relying on a network of volunteers to help them
Recent changes to abortion law in Texas, which have prohibited abortions after six weeks – one of the most restrictive rules in the nation – and Poland’s near total ban on the procedure last year make it clear just how slippery the slope still is. We have to ask: what kind of country do we want to live in? A democratic one in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning their health and body, or one in which half the population is free and the state corrals the bodies of the other half?
Women who are not allowed to make their own decisions about whether or not to give birth are, in fact, owned by the state, as the state claims the right to dictate the uses to which their bodies must be put. The work of the Abortion Support Network (ASN) and the need for it in apparently progressive Europe is a stiff reminder: democratic rights don’t grow on trees. They must be struggled for and maintained. Those at risk of forced childbearing should be very grateful to have such organisations and their volunteers in their corner.
– MARGARET ATWOOD
In the evenings, after she is done with her day job in London, Ciara makes phone calls to people across Europe. Everyone she calls has contacted the ASN, a UK-based charity that helps people from European countries to access abortions. She is one of about 80 volunteers providing logistical advice, travel planning, a place to stay and solidarity to people who live in countries with restrictive abortion access. Mara Clarke, who founded ASN in 2009, says, “People think that abortion travel is an American or developing-world thing, but it isn’t.”
While there has rightfully been extensive coverage of the US, given the introduction of restrictive abortion laws in Texas and the potential for the Roe v Wade ruling to be overturned this year, the evolving situation in Europe has received little attention.
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When she set up ASN, Clarke was told there was no demand for a European abortion helpline. “I knew that wasn’t right,” she says. “If there were women who could afford to pay to travel for an abortion, there were other women who couldn’t.”
Clarke was proved right. Calls came first from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, and the charity began helping hundreds of women every year. As abortion laws became more liberal in those countries in 2018 and 2019, ASN opened their services to Poland, Malta and Gibraltar, and anyone else in Europe who needs it (just because abortion is technically legal in a country does not mean it is always straightforward to access). ASN also works with partner organisations across the continent who direct people to one another for local advice and funding.
‘Money is often the biggest hurdle for our callers’: Ciara, 36, helpline volunteer, London
I grew up in Dublin. Abortion was something I’d talk about with my friends, but the “going to England” part it entailed was mysterious to us. There was always this concern that if one of us needed an abortion, none of us would know how to go about it.
I heard about ASN when I went to a vigil at the Irish embassy in London in 2012 for Savita Halappanavar. Savita had died from a septic miscarriage at a Galway hospital after her requests for an abortion were denied. Her death underlined to me that the fight for reproductive rights is about life and death, and it drove the campaign to repeal Ireland’s eighth amendment, which effectively banned abortion.
I began donating to ASN, and soon after responded to a call for volunteers. Working on the helpline was scary at first. I got training and support, but I was speaking to people in vulnerable situations. In my second week, a man called from a Northern Ireland hospital because his wife’s pregnancy was in danger. He thought they might have to travel to England to get an abortion and wanted to know what he needed to do.
We work with each caller to see what they need. It can be anything from a simple question about arranging an appointment at a clinic, to figuring out the most efficient travel plan for them and assisting with money. The later the abortion, the more expensive it becomes. The cost of the procedure, which is £1,300 in England for a second trimester abortion, plus travel, childcare and time off work, can be high. Money is often the biggest hurdle for our callers. I’ve given a grant of £5 before – that was all that was preventing a woman from accessing an abortion.
You need to speak to most clients several times. I fit the calls around my day job, either during lunchtime or in the evenings. When I was in the office, I’d find a meeting room where I could speak privately. It can require a mental shift to go from speaking to someone about something that is so emotionally challenging for them, to returning to my regular life.
You really get the warm and fuzzies from doing this. In 2018, when the eighth amendment was put to a referendum in Ireland and repealed, an ASN colleague was approached by a woman who mentioned me by name and said I saved her life. I think about that often.
‘Some know what they need; others just say, “Please help me”’: Kasia, 35, adviser and helpline volunteer, London
A few years ago I joined some activist groups on Facebook and saw ASN’s ad for Polish-speaking volunteers. This work combines my two favourite things: feminism and logistics. When someone calls, I can give tangible support. There are people who know what they need, and others who are completely lost and just say, “Please help me.”
We have a checklist of questions to understand their circumstances. We find out how far along they are, as there are different legal limits in different countries – sometimes abortion pills can be an answer. The UK has the longest limit at 24 weeks. That, and where they live, helps us figure out the most suitable place for callers to travel to. Most people from Poland travel to the Netherlands or Spain, and most people from Ireland go to England. We get calls from other countries where the law is more liberal; in Italy, many doctors conscientiously object to abortion and in France abortion is permitted on demand only up to 14 weeks.
Now we ask about passports; Brexit means people from the EU can no longer travel to the UK using only their national ID card, which affects many callers. We also find out how much money they have, to give grants.
Callers are often angry, especially from Poland. They feel abandoned by the government and stigmatised by society. It can be nice to offer solidarity and say, “It’s not you, it’s the system. It shouldn’t be like this.” And to remind them that they are not alone.
There’s this unspoken assumption that abortion is always a difficult choice, or there is suffering to endure, but that’s not the reality. No one wants an abortion, but there are people who don’t feel guilt. I’ve also spoken to callers who didn’t believe in abortion, but need one.
The work can get stressful and busy, but there’s a feeling of solidarity. We have a few WhatsApp groups, and when something happens, the volunteers reach out and lift each other up; that support is tremendous.
‘The people who come from Ireland are so brave and strong to travel such a distance’: Patricia, 67, host and retired social work trainer, Liverpool
My daughter works at the city’s Merseyside Clinic and told me there were women coming over from Ireland seeking abortions who had nowhere to stay. This was nine years ago and I thought, “I’ve got a spare room.” I became ASN’s first host in Liverpool. There are about seven of us now.
We get emails asking if anyone can take a client on particular dates. When I say yes, I’m given their name, age and when they’re coming. It’s not a lot of background, but it’s as much as I need.
Everybody I’ve hosted has come from Ireland. Even though the law has changed there, access to an abortion after 12 weeks is permitted only in limited circumstances, so the women who come now tend to be further along than they used to be. I’ll pick them up, make a meal and we’ll eat together. Some want to tell you everything about their lives and you have a laugh; others are feeling more vulnerable and don’t want to engage. I let people talk as much or as little as they want. Why they are having an abortion has nothing to do with me.
Most come on their own. Many have children at home. Often they haven’t told anyone what they’re doing. I had a young woman who was a refugee in Ireland. There was also a grandmother who brought her 15-year-old granddaughter. The people who come are so brave and strong to travel such a distance. They’re having to make decisions and organise things quickly. It’s rewarding to be able to support them through that.
‘In Malta, we’re taught from a young age that abortion is synonymous with murder’: Hanien, 24, volunteer for a helpline in Malta, currently living in Dublin
I was against abortion when I was younger because that was the only reality I knew. Malta is a Catholic country and there is anti-abortion sentiment in its institutions. We’re taught from a young age that abortion is synonymous with murder, and that a woman who seeks one is evil.
Maltese law states that abortion is a criminal offence, with no exceptions. Any person who seeks or helps with one can face up to three years in prison. The penalty is higher for medical professionals.
I became interested in women’s rights around 2016 when the morning-after pill became legally available. I’ve volunteered for the Family Planning Advisory Service in Malta since it started in 2020. It’s a pro-choice helpline providing information about reproductive health choices. Because of the law in Malta, we cannot help people get an abortion or give them money towards travel to get one, but we can share publicly available information, like the fact that ASN exists.
The main danger in this work is the social stigma. Malta is a small country and you can be easily identified. The stigma is greater if you’re a woman and even more so if you are a person of colour. It’s framed as, “Look at this person who is foreign and bringing this evil on us.”
Sometimes people are surprised that I do this. I wear a hijab and people associate being religious with being anti-choice and anti-abortion. But that is misinformation and ignorance about how Muslims view abortion. This work is my way of standing up against damaging patriarchal structures that affect me and my peers.
‘I hate that people are panicking about money, childcare and flights’: Pip, 26, veterinary surgeon and volunteer, Manchester
My job is to make posts for ASN’s Instagram that help people understand the charity’s work and encourage people to donate. I fit it in around my day job.
I became interested in abortion access when I was 17. I was at boarding school and a girl asked me for help getting an abortion. She felt alone and terrified – and this was in England where abortion is legal. I hate that people from countries where abortion isn’t legal are panicking about money, childcare and booking flights.
Being an openly queer person, I’m no stranger to online abuse and harassment, which helps with the moderation side of the job. We have a coordinated response which boils down to, “Don’t feed the trolls.” So on Instagram, hateful comments get deleted immediately and people get blocked. We have a lot of evangelical Christian, American men harassing us. “Murderers” is a common insult. And there’s a lot of misogynistic harassment and insinuations that if a woman wants to have unprotected sex, then she should have to deal with the consequences.
An American man was repeatedly making threatening comments on our Facebook page and one of our followers reported him to the FBI. He was recently sentenced to 20 months.
You can feel powerless in the face of the wave of restrictions on people’s bodily autonomy. But it does feel powerful to know the work we’re doing changes lives.
‘We can’t change the law on our own, but this work gives me a sense of agency’: Aga, 27, Abortion Without Borders volunteer, Warsaw, Poland
After the recent death of a 37-year-old woman who was denied an abortion in Poland, there’s been an atmosphere of grief here. It’s the third known case reported since a near-total ban came into force in January 2021.
Three years ago, I moved to the Netherlands and a friend told me the Abortion Network Amsterdam (ANA) needed Polish-speaking volunteers. I did email shifts responding to people and helping them set up travel and appointments. I once accompanied someone to a clinic; my role was to translate, but there was a support element, too.
ANA helps people with costs, and when their funds aren’t enough, they contact ASN. Both are part of the Abortion Without Borders network, which is made up of groups across Europe.
The volume of emails increased dramatically in the run-up to the Polish abortion ban. After I returned to Poland six months ago, I had to stop helping individuals directly: I work as a translator, helping with medical records and press releases, but I no longer set up abortions myself because when you’re in Poland, you have to be far more careful. You need to find where the line lies and that’s murky; the way the laws are set up means there’s a lot of room for interpretation. We’re very careful to stick to things we can’t be prosecuted for.
While we don’t have control over what happens in Polish hospitals, and we can’t change the law on our own, doing this work gives me a sense of agency in an otherwise overwhelming situation.
‘I cannot have this baby’: testimonies from women who have contacted the charity
“I am 21 weeks and three days pregnant. I wish I could have this baby, but it has been diagnosed with severe brain defects. I need help in arranging a trip abroad. I have no idea how to go about this.”
“I am eight or nine weeks pregnant. I have a very difficult family and financial situation. My husband beats me and my children, and abuses alcohol. I don’t want the same for my third child. My husband raped me and it turns out that I am pregnant.”
“I am pregnant: 21 weeks. I only found out at 16 weeks. I live in Poland. I cannot have this baby. I have no money or support because the baby’s father left me as soon as he found out. I don’t have money to go abroad to a clinic, so I ordered abortion pills, but after over a month, they still haven’t arrived. I don’t know what to do.”
“I am 18 weeks pregnant and the baby has a serious heart defect. The doctors told me to expect that at any moment the baby may die. I can’t bear it, I can’t function normally. All the antenatal tests so far have ruined us financially because they are not covered in Poland.”
“I feel incapacitated in my country and am ashamed that I live here and have to get help from people from a foreign country. I know that after the procedure a stone will fall from my heart. Carrying such a sick child is probably every mother’s worst nightmare. I will be grateful to you till the end of my life, and I will support you as much as I can because there will be more women like me because of the stupid law in this country.”
“The doctor told me the baby was very unlikely to survive in the womb, but because of our legislation I was not able to access an abortion. I wish that I lived in a country where they trusted women to make the right choices for themselves.”
“I don’t want to write that our pregnancy was a matter of life and death, but it was. You gave us a chance for further life. We are still so shocked and grateful that there is still such a thing as genuine, honest kindness and selflessness in this world.”
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas. (photo: Jay Janner/Austin American Statesman)
Professors in Texas, Alabama and elsewhere approve resolutions supporting academic freedom
These declarations show that the heated debate over state regulation of lessons on race, centered so far largely on K-12 public schools, is rapidly expanding onto college campuses. In this case it pits politicians, mainly Republicans, who depict themselves as guardians of objectivity concerning “divisive concepts,” against professors who say the state has no business meddling in the content of lectures, syllabi and seminars.
The latest skirmish has erupted in Texas.
On Monday, the Faculty Council of the University of Texas at Austin approved, on a 41-to-5 vote with three abstentions, a resolution rejecting “any attempts by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate the content of university curriculum on any matter, including matters related to racial and social justice.” The resolution said the council will “stand firm against any and all encroachment” on faculty authority, including by the legislature.
Afterward, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) denounced the resolution. “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory,” he wrote in a tweet. “We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed.” On Friday, Patrick said he would support ending the job-protection measure known as tenure for professors who teach critical race theory.
UT Austin declined to comment on Patrick’s statements or on the faculty resolution.
Critical race theory is both an academic framework for examining the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism and a catchall term that many GOP politicians have embraced to describe various kinds of lessons about race and racism they find objectionable.
Through laws and directives, several states have taken steps recently to govern teaching and training about race in elementary and secondary schools. A few of the laws, including one in Idaho, also directly affect higher education. More proposals have emerged in legislatures, with an increasing number targeting universities. PEN America, an organization that advocates the freedom to write, is tracking 113 bills across the country that it describes as proposed “educational gag orders.” More than 40 touch on higher education. How many will be enacted is unclear.
Many proposals aim to severely restrict how professors talk about gender, race and American history, said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education for PEN America. “What was once a relatively finite list of things that were being banned is being creatively embellished and expanded in new ways,” he said.
Among the “divisive concepts” targeted in these bills are the idea that an individual is inherently racist or sexist, whether consciously or unconsciously; the idea that “meritocracy” and “hard work ethic” are racist or sexist terms, created to oppress people; and the idea that someone should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.
Collectively, Friedman said, the bills pose a threat to open academic inquiry in schools and universities. “The ratcheting up of these bills is certainly having a chilling effect on how teachers might think or teach or write about these issues, how students learn about them, what people feel comfortable talking about in college classrooms,” he said.
Culture-war politics have propelled the bills. Many Republicans want to emulate the example of Glenn Youngkin (R), who was elected governor of Virginia last fall after a campaign focused in part on attacking critical race theory in schools.
“If you don’t think universities are indoctrinating your kids, everybody needs to wake up,” Alabama state Rep. Ed Oliver (R), sponsor of one such bill, told “The Jeff Poor Show,” on talk radio in Mobile, in June. He said opposing critical race theory was “the way we stand up to woke-ism.”
Many historians and educators are pleading for perspective. “The ability of students to learn American history that is taught with professional integrity is not a partisan issue,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “No state wants its students to graduate ignorant.”
At a growing number of colleges and universities, faculty are fighting back. The African American Policy Forum, a think tank that advocates for racial justice, gender equality and human rights, counts more than a dozen faculty resolutions that have been approved in recent months in support of academic freedom. The forum has circulated a template for the resolutions, but professors involved in these efforts say faculty usually tailor them to their own campuses or draft them from scratch.
At the University of Alabama, the Faculty Senate approved an academic freedom resolution on Dec. 14 on a 38-to-15 vote.
The resolution did not mention race. But it declared that “any pending legislation in the Alabama legislature that infringes on academic freedom and expression is anathema” to the ideal of academic freedom. The resolution also said the Faculty Senate “expects” the university president to “acknowledge that The University of Alabama opposes proposed and future legislation that undermines academic freedom and, therefore, the historic purpose of higher education, and expects the Board of Trustees to maintain its stated commitment to academic freedom.”
Asked about the resolution, the university said in a statement: “Academic freedom is fundamental to higher education. The University of Alabama … offers varied and numerous perspectives in the classroom and aspires for students to be exposed to a multitude of views while forming their own opinions and beliefs. Academic freedom allows faculty to research and teach the topics in which they have expertise and allows students to learn about those topics — even if they disagree. The University of Alabama System advocacy team is providing state leaders with input and feedback from the campus community.”
It is not yet clear what the Republican-led legislature in Alabama might approve. Among other proposals, one bill would bar public institutions of higher education from requiring students to assent to certain “divisive” concepts about race, sex or religion. One example of a divisive concept, according to the bill: “That with respect to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”
Sara McDaniel, a professor of special education at Alabama who supported the faculty resolution, said many faculty members are nervous about speaking out, especially those with limited or no job protections. “I think we are in a hyper-politicized environment,” she said. “It’s a balancing act. All of us will be careful with what we say and share.” But McDaniel said it was important to “lay down a marker” for the principle of academic freedom. “I don’t think any of us want to just stand aside and hope for the best and be quiet about it,” she said.
At Ohio State University, faculty leaders obtained approval Dec. 2 from the University Senate, on a 95-to-5 vote, for a resolution that denounced in explicit terms efforts to restrict how race is taught. “There are no ‘two sides’ to racism,” the resolution said, “any more than there are two sides to the Holocaust or the roundness of the earth; there are only truths that must be taught well so that we might ensure better futures for all citizens.”
Caroline Clark, a professor of teaching and learning at Ohio State, helped draft the resolution. Clark said faculty must speak out for academic freedom, not only at universities, but also in K-12 schools. “Silence is a choice, right?” she said. “It’s not neutral. It is a stance in and of itself.”
Another academic freedom resolution cleared the Faculty Senate of Pennsylvania State University on Jan. 25, on a vote of 117 to 23. The resolution denounced efforts to control academic content by labeling certain teaching approaches as “divisive,” and it rejected efforts by outsiders “to restrict or dictate university curriculum on any matter.”
Such votes can also illuminate divisions among faculty.
A transcript of the Penn State senate meeting shows that some faculty members raised concerns about the way the resolution was drafted. One professor warned that there’s a perception that people in academia tend to misrepresent the views of their critics, “hiding behind principles” in a bid to protect their own power. “I don’t think that’s true here,” the professor said. “But we’re playing right into that narrative.”
At UT Austin, a video recording of the Faculty Council meeting showed Richard Lowery, an associate professor of finance, objecting to the action taken Monday. He called the resolution “stunningly hypocritical” and said it failed to take an evenhanded approach to free-speech questions. “This is entirely one-sided,” he said. “You’re promoting the idea that academic freedom is the collective right of the faculty to decide which ideas are allowed on campus, not the individual right of faculty to express their own ideas.” He said faculty shouldn’t be allowed to turn the university into a “social justice indoctrination camp.”
Elizabeth Gershoff, a professor of human development and family sciences, replied: “What you’re missing is that this is not a prescriptive resolution. This is not saying that you personally need to say anything about this. But it is giving others permission to do so.”
Faculty across the country are paying attention. Jennifer Ruth, a professor of film at Portland State University, has been active in a campaign to promote academic freedom resolutions nationally. One such measure was approved at her university in Oregon. She said many professors are realizing that they have a stake in the debate even if history or race is not their field.
“One thing that the resolution has seemed to accomplish on almost every campus is that individual faculty members who vote for it move from, ‘I don’t have a dog in this fight’ if they don’t do critical race theory, to ‘Oh, right, we all have a dog in this fight because it’s critical race theory this time but it will be climate change or x or y next time, and I do climate research,’” Ruth said in an email.
Solidarity matters, she said. “Faculty need to stand together.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian. (photo: Reuters)
The legislators’ show of force comes as an agreement may be reached in Vienna with world powers within days.
In a statement read out on Sunday, 250 legislators in the 290-member parliament – in control of conservatives and hardliners since 2020 – called on President Ebrahim Raisi to adhere to their conditions in restoring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
They said the “cruel and terrorist” American government – and its “weak and contemptible” followers France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – have shown they are not bound by any agreement over the past few years, so Iran must learn from the experience and set clear red lines.
The legislators defined those as receiving a guarantee by the US and the so-called E3 that they will not abandon the nuclear deal again – as Washington did unilaterally in 2018 under former President Donald Trump, who pulled out and imposed punishing sanctions.
“The US regime and other countries party to the JCPOA must pledge that they won’t use the snapback mechanism,” they wrote in reference to a clause defined in the nuclear accord that automatically reimposes United Nations sanctions on Iran if it breaches the deal.
The parliamentarians also asserted all sanctions imposed under “false excuses” must be lifted – which they defined as nuclear, terrorism, missile, and human rights designations, in addition to those under the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA), Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), and U-Turn sanctions on dollar transactions.
Implementation
To ensure effective implementation of their demands, the legislators called for an unspecified “verification” process, after which Iran would act to scale back its nuclear advances to come into full compliance with the terms of the JCPOA again.
After waiting for a year after the US exit, Iran started gradually boosting its nuclear capabilities in 2019. The process has significantly accelerated since December 2020, when the same parliament passed a law that forced the administration of moderate former President Hassan Rouhani to take more measures.
The law garnered enough support after two major attacks on Iran’s main nuclear facilities in Natanz, and the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a top nuclear scientist. Iran blamed Israel as the perpetrator of those attacks.
While maintaining its nuclear programme is strictly peaceful, Iran is now enriching uranium up to 60 percent using advanced centrifuges. This is while the nuclear deal restricted Iran’s enrichment to 3.67 percent using first-generation machines.
Lastly, the legislators on Sunday reminded President Raisi that based on their law, his administration can only act to scale back the country’s nuclear advances if parliament approves the lifting of banking and oil sanctions by the US.
Raisi, who was a chief critic of the nuclear deal alongside other conservatives before championing its restoration since taking the presidency in August 2021, has publicly stated conditions that are largely in line with the parliament’s vision.
His administration has said it wants all US sanctions imposed since 2018 lifted, and demands guarantees Washington will not renege again. It also wants time to time to verify the lifting of sanctions before again restricting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Agreement in Vienna in sight
The show of force by the Iranian legislators comes shortly after all negotiating parties in Vienna – Iran, the US, E3, China and Russia – have said the talks that initially began in April 2021 are in their final stretch.
Most issues have been agreed to restore the JCPOA, but several issues remain, and both Iran and Western parties continue to say publicly the other side needs to make the final decision to resolve them.
All maintain nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.
The US State Department said last week the key stakeholders were in “the very final stages … of a complex negotiation”. Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s chief negotiator, has said a deal could be reached by the end of February.
Even Israel, the nuclear deal’s staunchest opponent, which sent a political delegation to Vienna earlier this week unexpectedly, appears to have made peace with the imminent prospect of a restored nuclear deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Sunday that an agreement may materalise “shortly”, but it will be “weaker” than the one reached in 2015.
Defence Minister Benny Gantz also told US Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday any deal with Iran must include consistent enforcement by the UN nuclear watchdog.
Andrei documents logging in protected forests in Romania. For his safety, he is identified in this story by a pseudonym. (photo: TNR)
The furniture giant is hungry for Romania’s famed trees. Little stands in its way.
The filmmakers—Mihai Dragolea, a director, and Radu Mocanu, a cameraman—were shadowing a local environmentalist, Tiberiu Bosutar. A former wood chipper turned activist, Bosutar was no stranger to illegal timber. Over the course of five years, he had built a reputation as something of a forest vigilante, accosting loggers engaged in questionable activity or following trucks stuffed with wood contraband, then streaming the encounters on Facebook Live. Just a few weeks before, he’d gone viral broadcasting an attempt to detain a truck carrying illegal logs; when his white SUV ran out of gas, he flagged down an ambulance and kept up the chase.
But the filmmakers’ trip wasn’t meant to be a stunt. The group took Bosutar’s personal vehicle, well-known in the area, and lingered for coffee at a nearby gas station to make their presence known and prove that they had not come to antagonize. Then, with Bosutar behind the wheel, the person who’d tipped them off about the cut riding shotgun, and the filmmakers in the back, they took to the highway, turned left up a dirt road, and began to climb.
It didn’t take long before they saw what they came for: stumps. “The forest was fucked up to the bone,” Dragolea told me. “It was really damaged.” No surprise, really, and on any other day, Bosutar might have taken to Facebook. Instead, he chose to call the forest ranger’s office. It was an ideal opportunity, he thought, to showcase the potential for communication between activists, law enforcement, and loggers, and fulfill a New Year’s resolution to try a less combative approach. “It was a good moment to show that we are open to dialogue.”
Not long after, they heard the whinge of engines; soon, two SUVs arrived. Out jumped not local police, but a horde: 15 men armed with bats and axes. The documentary crew broke for Bosutar’s car but couldn’t get the locks in time. The attackers pried the doors open, snapped the key, slashed the tires, and smashed the camera equipment. They beat Mocanu, trapped between the car and the mountainside, unconscious. They clubbed Dragolea in the face. The director dove down the nearby ravine, where he hid under the roots of a fallen tree and called the police, begging them to come with their sirens on. “I said, ‘They’re killing the journalists in the forest, and they are tracking me down,’” he recounted. “I knew cases where people had died in the forest, I saw axes around me. If someone didn’t call, we were going to die for sure.”
Meanwhile, with Bosutar still in the car, the attackers were attempting to push the vehicle off the mountainside, hoisting the chassis up on two wheels. When he agreed to get out, they bludgeoned him, stripped him naked, and posted photos of him online, blood streaming down his face, with the caption, in Romanian: “For the virgin forests, I take my shirt off.” They directed him to walk down the hill until he encountered a second group of attackers.
But the police got there first, along with ambulances, which took all three men, two of whom passed out in transit, to the hospital. Not long after, the incident made international news via an Associated Press wire. The beating was even picked up stateside by The Washington Post.
There wasn’t much more help on the way. A police spokesman told the AP that law enforcement would treat the attack with “the utmost attention”; less than a week later, only four of the 15 assailants had been charged, not with attempted murder but with the lighter charge of brawling. All were out of jail, pending trial. Fearing for his life and his family, Bosutar fled from Suceava to Bucharest. “This is not the first time I’ve had an attempt on my life,” he told me outside the hotel where he was hiding. “It’s been three or four times already that I’ve been attacked. Do I simply admit that this is a failed state, that I don’t have an ally within it?”
“I don’t know what I should do,” he added, and started to cry.
In an accident of geography and history, Romania is home to one of the largest and most important old-growth forests left in the world. Its Carpathian mountain chain, which wraps like a seat belt across the country’s middle and upper shoulder, hosts at least half of Europe’s remaining old growth outside Scandinavia and around 70 percent of the continent’s virgin forest. It’s been referred to as the Amazon of Europe, a comparison apt and ominous in equal measure, because of the speed at which it, like the Amazon itself, is disappearing.
Most of Europe was rapidly deforested during the industrial era; less than 4 percent of EU forestland remains intact. Romania, far enough from the continent’s industrial centers and long a closed-off member of the Soviet bloc, remained a shining exception. During the country’s communist period, the government converted the forests to public ownership and kept them off global export markets, enshrining the forest management trends of an ancien regime. The result is that Romania retains some of the rare spruce, beech, and oak forests that qualify as old- or primary-growth, having never been excessively logged, altered by human activity, or artificially replanted.
But the fall of communism in 1989 dissolved one layer of protection for those forests, and the subsequent wave of privatization inaugurated widespread corruption. In 2007, Romania’s entry to the European Union created a massive, liberated market for the country’s cheap, abundant timber and the inexpensive labor required to extract it, conditions that encouraged Austrian timber companies and Swedish furniture firms to set up shop. Succeeding fractious, ineffectual regimes enacted further pro-market reforms and did little to curb corruption; in the final months of 2021, the country’s prime minister designate found himself unable to form a government at all. Add to that the astronomical growth of the fast furniture industry, which particularly relies on the spruce and beech that populate these forests, and the result has been a delirium of deforestation.
There’s one obvious, notable beneficiary of this situation: Ikea. The company is now the largest individual consumer of wood in the world, its appetite growing by two million trees a year. According to some estimates, it sources up to 10 percent of its wood from the relatively small country of Romania, and has long enjoyed relationships with mills and manufacturers in the region. In 2015, it began buying up forestland in bulk; within months it became, and remains, Romania’s largest private landowner.
The global market’s edacity for timber, perhaps predictably, has gone far beyond the legal limits set up by an already permissive state. According to a 2018 report, initially suppressed by the Romanian government and leaked later that year, the country saw 38.6 million cubic meters of wood exit its forests annually during the preceding four-year period; the government had licensed just 18.5 million cubic meters. In other words, without even accounting for possible violations based on method of extraction, more than half of the country’s timber is illegally harvested. Even legal logging, which on private and public land alike must be preceded by a forest management plan that is approved by the government, can be rife with corruption and abuse. Since roughly the date of Romania’s accession to the EU, between half and two-thirds of the country’s virgin forest has been lost.
As is often the case in trades dominated by illegality, violence is never far behind, and around the time of Ikea’s purchases, a wave of high-profile, logging-related attacks commenced. In 2015, Romanian environmentalist Gabriel Paun was beaten unconscious by loggers in an ambush caught on camera; he eventually fled the country and has spent years living in hiding. Doina Pana, the former minister of waters and forests, announced that she had been poisoned with mercury in 2017 after attempting to crack down on illegal logging. In late 2019, two forest rangers, Raducu Gorcioaia and Liviu Pop, were murdered in separate attacks in the span of just a handful of weeks.
“We spent so many years looking at the Amazon and Indonesia, the Congo basin and Russia, all these places that are just much more famous for really bad stuff happening in the forests,” said David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency, which tracks environmental crime around the world. When the agency started looking at Romania, Gehl told me, its members were “shocked” to see the same kinds of things happening within the snug confines of the European Union, where international, consumer-facing brands like Ikea prosper.
With so little formal law enforcement—Romania’s Forest Guard was chartered in 2015 as a 617-person unit that doesn’t work nights or weekends—the task of protecting the forests has often fallen to activists and volunteers, a responsibility that has proved treacherous. All told, at least six patrolmen have been killed in recent years; in another 650 registered incidents, people have been beaten, shot at, or otherwise attacked in relation to illegal logging. Neither 2019 case went to trial; Paun’s attackers, caught on film, remain free.
“I felt safer in Iraq, in Mosul, in 2016,” said Mircea Barbu, a former foreign correspondent who now works as an investigator for the Romanian environmental NGO Agent Green. “In Iraq, it’s just a matter of bad luck if they catch you—if you get out of there, they’re not gonna follow you back home.”
So when I met up with Andrei last September to investigate logging in protected old growth, we knew we would have to take precautions. Identified here by a pseudonym for his protection, Andrei was in the last leg of a 17-day trip that had taken him to the far corners of the country. For a report to the European Commission, he was documenting logging that had occurred during the previous 12 months in protected Natura 2000 sites, examining locations where satellites had indicated continued conspicuous forest loss and evidence of habitat degradation. He had agreed to let me tag along for the final three days of his trip. Thickset like a rugby player, his beard just starting to gray, Andrei looked like someone who’d fare fine in a fight—an impression offset by his jovial demeanor.
The Natura 2000 program, established by the EU, protects a network of natural areas for their outstanding value as habitats, particularly for animals such as bears, lynx, and birds. The standards apply to privately and publicly owned land alike, and govern Romania by dint of the country’s admission into the EU. Natura 2000 sites play a crucial role in the 2030 EU Biodiversity Strategy, for which there is an actionable legal standard, and are similarly important to the EU’s climate ambitions, for which there is not. Old-growth forests absorb 70 percent more carbon than logged and replanted trees, making them the most effective carbon-capture method on the planet; by the time a single beech tree reaches 150 years of age, it will have absorbed nine tons of CO2, the equivalent of 35,000 miles driven by car, its sequestration rate accelerating as it ages.
For obvious reasons, Andrei labors under cover. If anyone asks, he says he’s a tourist in search of nature photos. He works weekends, when logging sites are less likely to be active, so as to avoid run-ins and minimize the chance of getting recognized. He uses a drone to capture much of his footage; hovering at 300 meters, it buzzes out of earshot and is invisible from the ground. It doesn’t hurt that his car is a rental, whose plate number won’t easily be traced to him. Usually he travels alone, or with a friend. “For me, it’s quite rare to be out with journalists,” he said.
On a dusty highway turnout, we laid out the day’s plan: We would drive into the Southern Fagaras mountains, where we’d try to access a couple of locations that—according to an amalgam of satellite images from Google Earth and lower-res, more frequently updated images from a server called Sentinel Playground—looked to hold recent clear-cuts. I’d follow along in my rented Toyota Corolla as far as it could handle the conditions, then I’d pile into his white Dacia Duster, a small 4x4 SUV common in Romania, and we’d take logging roads the rest of the way. Provided that the Duster didn’t give out sooner (in the past two weeks, the rear tire had locked up, the hand brake had failed, and the engine was leaking oil), we’d hike the final leg on foot, hoping to get incontrovertible photo and video evidence of the forest’s condition.
Illegal logging comes in various forms. The most common is cutting in excess of the amount permitted (clear-cuts larger than three hectares, for instance, violate Romanian regulations), but any method that damages waterways, causes erosion, or leaves a mess behind can also run afoul of the law. Only a few minutes after I left my car at a forbidding cluster of potholes, we had our first encounter. Rounding a bend in the road, we found our path blocked by two trucks, one being disgorged of recently cut logs, the other being loaded up for transit, likely to a depot, from which wood is sold. Large logs were piled along the roadside as well, awaiting export. “There are still some branches attached,” Andrei pointed out. “It’s illegal to bring them down like this because you’re damaging the soil when you drag them.” Often, silt in the river can be a signal that logging is happening nearby, but the water to our right remained clear, an indication that the timber had likely been brought down from much higher up the mountain.
While we waited, Andrei set up his camera, and, keeping it low on the dashboard, took photos of the scene. “Normally, when I take photos, I make sure they don’t see me,” he told me. “I just want to make sure I’m getting the number plates of these trucks, because we can check them later.”
Once the load was cleared, we continued, encountering one more logging outfit before we finally arrived at a dam and ran out of drivable road. After parking, we hiked up a steep, dirt logging path that had been substantially eroded—also, technically, a legal infraction.
From the roadside, the area looked densely forested and largely untouched, and within minutes of entering, we saw evidence of its old-growth status: Spruce, beech, and maple of various sizes and ages grew interspersed, their trunks scabby with mosses, lichens, fungi. The ground was soft with rotting organic matter; wild berry bushes, picked over, suggested bears. Some of the bigger trees reached well beyond 100 feet tall; numerous behemoths were easily 300 years old. The diversity of age, type, and density proved that this region had never been substantially logged or replanted. Even to an amateur, the difference between this forest and the closely packed, uniform grove visible on an opposite peak, a replanted patch of trees of identical age and size, was obvious.
We climbed farther still, until we arrived at a clearing from which we could launch the drone. Once airborne, the camera delivered a stark revelation. The thicket we were hiking through was flanked by commercial logging on all sides. As the drone panned, bald patches revealed themselves on the monitor: new clear-cuts. The spots metastasized across the mountaintop. Elsewhere, we saw what looked like claw marks, the gashes where trees had been pulled down the mountain by cable. In many places, what remained was just brown dirt; the cuts were new enough that not even grass or weeds had had time to grow. The sight of newly built roads indicated that more logging would soon start. Meanwhile, in the clusters that remained untouched, wind had begun toppling and uprooting the exposed trees.
“This is one of the worst,” Andrei said when I asked how the area compared to what he’d seen so far in his survey. “It’s very rare to see so many clear-cuts.” Between wind damage, erosion, and bark beetles, he estimated, there would soon be “nothing left.” We brought the drone down, hiked to a second spot, and launched it again. The work was methodical: Log the footage, mark the location on the map. When the battery ran low, we began our descent to the car.
As proof that they’re following the law, truckers are required to upload photographs of their loads to an online database called SUMAL, which maintains active logging permits. But there are work-arounds. Sometimes, the truckers won’t submit until they’re apprehended by authorities, at which point they’ll offer the documentation and claim they’d been out of cell service range. Other times, they’ll put water on the camera lens or photograph only half of their haul. Though illegal transports in broad daylight are uncommon, Andrei and I looked up the plate numbers we’d seen. Most checked out as expected. But one of the drivers, who had submitted a photo with only half the load in the frame, claimed to be carrying just seven cubic meters of wood, a quarter of what the other trucks of that size reported. Unfortunately, the wood had long since been dropped off at a depot, mixed up with legal logs, possibly even sold to a mill. It was too late to do anything.
In early 2020, the European Commission announced infringement proceedings against Romania for allowing logging without an environmental assessment in Natura 2000 zones. A few months later, the commission escalated the case by issuing a “reasoned opinion,” the last step before hauling the country before the European Court of Justice. Despite deliberating over national legislation that would conform to EU standards, the Romanian government has as yet implemented little besides upping criminal penalties for wood theft.
One might think the infringement proceeding would slow deforestation; if anything, the opposite has been true. The threat of new legislation that would protect both privately and publicly owned old-growth forests has sparked a race to extract timber from those areas as quickly as possible. In 2018, an infringement hearing from the commission shut down all logging in Poland’s Bialowieza forest, also an old-growth Natura 2000 site, after evidence emerged of logging 100-year-old trees. “Obviously, there is now increased pressure,” Andrei told me. “If you want to remove large volumes of wood without being asked questions, you do it now. If you wait until next year, you might not be able to do it.” Logging in a given area can degrade the surrounding forest enough to make it ineligible for protection, and this adds further motivation.
We were setting out that morning from a guesthouse in Curtea de Arges, a town so big and so far from the forest that no one would be suspicious of our presence. At breakfast, Andrei uploaded the previous day’s drone footage. We needed to visit numerous sites, this time in the area of Vidraru Dam, in order to keep on schedule.
Again we drove until my rental car couldn’t traverse the potholes. Again we were confronted by evidence of logging immediately thereafter—this time, the plangent hum of chain saws. A few minutes later, we ran into a forester who, upon hearing that we were tourists, recommended a scenic spot for picture-taking. By way of assurance, Andrei reminded me that it was Saturday, and most of the loggers would be done working by 1 p.m. In just a few hours, we would have nothing to worry about.
We drove until we found a logging road that looked like it would deliver us to a site we’d reviewed on satellite that morning. The road was already heavily eroded, with channels deeper than I was tall. Driving was impossible, so we hiked.
Right away, Andrei told me that this appeared to be an even rarer virgin forest; some of its trees he estimated at 500 years old, striking enough in stature for him to stop and take photos for his own camera roll. Traversable roads can be more difficult to find than the logging sites themselves, which became painfully obvious as our path continued to bend away from our destination. Soon enough, we were scaling and descending a series of steep ravines, futilely checking the GPS tracker; our destination was only a couple of hundred meters away, but it seemed unreachable. The dense forest cover kept the air cool but humid, and I was soaked through with sweat. When we finally hit a ridge line, the clear-cut was nowhere to be found. It’s possible, Andrei conceded, that the satellite was just showing wind damage.
But when he launched the drone, he spotted it below us, a hasty job that had left behind not just old-growth stumps but many of the logs themselves. Dead, graying wood covered the soil such that nothing, not even weeds, was growing back. Andrei filmed a short video, and we began our hike back down the mountain.
We spent the rest of the afternoon like this—launching the drone, getting footage, traipsing around on foot. Once the mid-September sun started dipping, we set off for our last location, in the direction the forester had recommended, and from where we’d heard the chain saws upon arrival.
Passing a shepherd’s hut, we began climbing roads of deteriorating quality, the car bottoming out not infrequently on potholes, rocks, and debris. After a time, we found something we didn’t expect: a placard announcing logging in the area. The permit, we read, had expired nearly two months before, on July 30. “Try to get a photo of that panel,” Andrei instructed me. “I already don’t like this.”
We stopped the car, and I got out to remove a branch that was blocking the road. Andrei pointed out deep, apparently recent tractor tracks in the mud. A few minutes later, we stopped again so I could cast aside another bough blocking our way. Andrei told me to do it quietly; it was possible these impediments were left to signal to loggers up ahead that someone was coming.
We inched up the road until finally we saw logs, big and freshly cut. They had been brought down with branches still attached, an infraction far less significant than the fact that this site was both protected and weeks off-permit.
Then we saw smoke. Farther up the road, just past the logs we were surveying, it plumed from the chimney of a matchbox-size logger’s trailer. “Ah fuck,” Andrei said. “Let’s grab a photo of this and then slowly head back.” Quietly, we turned the car around, and began making our way back down the mountain, trying to keep the engine noise minimal.
Once we had retreated far enough to be out of sight, Andrei parked the car and launched the drone. Tracing a barren seam up the mountain, he recorded video of the clearly active logging site, which hadn’t even been on his radar; the site we were targeting was still kilometers away. I stood watch to make sure we weren’t being pursued. “Do you have any phone signal here?” he asked. I didn’t. “Good. That means even if the loggers hear us, they can’t call anyone.” And then, less encouraging: “We are a bit exposed here.”
At that moment, I saw someone approaching quickly on foot. “There’s someone coming,” I blurted. He was too close for us to get the drone down and escape. Andrei handed me the controls and dove into the driver’s seat, jamming the key in the ignition and raking the gearshift into drive. If I flew the drone to a location ahead, he said, we could put some distance between us and our pursuer and have a chance to grab the device. The car beeped objections as we thrashed over potholes, and I tried to keep the drone on course overhead.
After a few minutes, the logger was out of sight, and Andrei parked the car. At his request, I fastidiously monitored the road behind. “I will be done in like 10 seconds,” he assured me. Not long after, I saw the logger again, closing in on us. “He’s coming, he’s coming,” I said. Andrei scrambled back into the car, and we set off again. Anyone driving inbound would have us blocked in; any trouble with the Duster would have left us marooned. I kept watch in the rear windshield, but we didn’t see anyone else; no one approached from ahead.
Tracing any individual tree from forest floor to showroom presents a near impossible challenge. As wood moves through the supply chain, it becomes increasingly difficult to pin down. Owners of a forest auction off its trees to be cut by a logging company, after which the wood is taken to a depot, sold to a mill that processes it into lumber, wood chips, or particleboard, then sold again to a manufacturer, which makes it into a chair, or the pieces of a chair, on behalf of furniture companies such as Ikea, which buy it, brand it, ship it, and sell it for at-home installation. Every link in that chain makes the wood’s point of origin fuzzier. Depots in particular are notorious for stacking illegal and legal logs together behind fencing or inside warehouses, where they become indistinguishable.
If the tracing problem makes it almost impossible to prove that any given log is illegal, it can make it equally difficult to prove that any particular log is legal. Dubious logging that never quite rises to the level of illegality can be just as bad as the formally illegal, and the two often trend toward each other. Plenty of wood, like the misreported truckload I saw on my first day, would be deemed illegal if only there were the resources to review it. Though it’s known that more than half of the country’s timber, on average, is extracted without permission, only 1 percent of that illegal wood gets officially tallied.
That reality is critical for the furniture industry, which is forecast to grow from $564 billion in 2020 to $850 billion by 2025. It’s especially important for Ikea, which is not only the largest furniture company in the world, but the largest buyer and retailer of wood. Having doubled its consumption in the last 10 years, it now devours 1 percent of the world’s timber annually, with a particular regional reliance on Romania and its surrounds. “Ikea’s growth goes really hand in glove with the forestry sector in Eastern Europe and Russia,” said Tara Ganesh, head of timber investigations at the U.K.-based NGO Earthsight. Ganesh has worked on multiple investigations of the company, whose presence in the region, she said, is “massive.”
The insatiable demand for trees means there’s almost no way the company would have the bandwidth to do what foreign governments can’t even manage and trace all the wood flowing in and out of its maw. When the 2018 report, which indicated that more than half of the country’s timber was illegally harvested, was leaked, Ikea dodged. “All the big companies came out and said: It’s not our fault. We get the legal stuff. All those Romanians, burning firewood, and that’s where the illegal stuff is going,” said Gehl of the EIA. That 55 percent of the country’s timber is feeding the fireplaces of a population that shrank over that same period and has decreased by four million since 1990, is, of course, an inconceivable suggestion.
Ikea, meanwhile, sports a sterling reputation for its environmental bona fides. According to the company’s website, more than 98 percent of its timber is sustainably harvested, meaning recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council; it intends to reach 100 percent imminently. “Under no circumstances do we allow irresponsible forestry practices,” a spokesperson told me. And yet at least 60 percent of its wood supply comes from Eastern Europe and Russia, around 10 percent from Romania in particular. How can Ikea’s claims be reconciled with its outsize presence in a scandal-plagued region?
The company’s reliance on FSC certification as a working synonym for sustainability helps explain. A small international NGO, the FSC sets a standard based on its 10 principles—for example, compliance with national laws, a commitment to enhancing the well-being of workers, an updated forest management plan—that is then conferred upon forestry operations by smaller, independent auditors, who are contracted by the logging and manufacturing companies to perform preannounced, scheduled reviews. If those groups refuse to grant certification, logging operations can simply shop around until they find an auditor willing to take the check and confer the stamp. Perhaps it goes without saying that such a system initiates a race to the bottom. Ever since the FSC came into being in 1993, it has provoked criticism among environmentalists; in 2018, Greenpeace called the organization “a tool for forestry and timber extraction.” It doesn’t help that Ikea is the largest wood consumer in the FSC network and was a founding member of the council. (Ikea “is only one of 1000+ members,” a spokesperson for FSC wrote me. “Our global standards are discussed and agreed by our members globally.”)
Similar problems appear up and down the supply chain. Ikea contracts with manufacturers, which have to acquire enough wood to make into furniture parts to fulfill their contracts. The manufacturers solicit sawmills, which have to come up with enough wood to supply the factories. “Once they make that commitment, they then have to find the wood for Ikea by hook or crook,” Ganesh said. “That can often result in them cutting corners on the environment or legality.”
When someone in the chain gets busted for using illicit or unsustainable sourcing—say, if a factory that makes folding chairs for Ikea is popped for sourcing timber from a legally protected forest in Poland—Ikea can simply distance itself and claim ignorance, a staple of subcontracting in any industry. The strategy makes for suitable PR, but it collapses under the slightest scrutiny. These contracted firms, at least in Romania, often sport the signature yellow and blue colors or work exclusively with the company; some even fly the Swedish flag. In 2020, the Romanian factory Plimob was caught out for using illegal timber in its chairs; it sports the blue and gold on its gate, visible even on Google street view. Plimob sells 98 percent of its goods to Ikea.
One investigation by Earthsight, the U.K. organization, found that illegal beechwood from Ukraine, harvested by the wood processing firm VGSM, was being used in the production of Ikea chairs manufactured by Plimob as well as shipped to Ikea directly. Together, Plimob and Ikea received 96 percent of VGSM’s beech, accepting shipments nearly every month between 2018 and 2020. Egger, another Romanian supplier of Ikea, has also gotten busted for importing illegal timber. An investigation found that the company’s children’s furniture line, Sundvik, was made with illegal pine from Siberian Russia. An Al Jazeera crew in Romania followed a truck full of illegal timber to a log yard that supplies Kronospan, an Ikea supplier that makes huge volumes of chipboard, a key element of Ikea furniture. All these firms—VGSM, Plimob, Egger, and Kronospan—are FSC-certified. In one infamous 2015 case, FSC-certified HS Timber (then called Schweighofer), Romania’s foremost spruce processor, was caught on hidden camera pledging not only to buy illegal timber, but to pay a bonus for it. In 2016, FSC provisionally suspended the firm’s certification, then severed ties a year later; Ikea waited until the council’s final decision to disassociate itself.
It might be easier for Ikea to patrol its intake if it used its own wood, but it claims that little of the forests it owns in Romania end up in its furniture production. Rather, the company has been selling logging concessions to companies ostensibly harvesting firewood, a separate enterprise entirely. But those holdings, too, hover in the interstice between legal and illegal.
Ikea bought its land from an unlikely source: the Harvard University endowment, which snatched up Romanian property after a post-communist land restitution law left an antic privatization system in its wake, handing over half of the country’s public forestland to private interests. Starting in 2004, the university, using various shells and nonprofit formations, began buying big with the help of a Romanian businessman, Dragos Lipan. A number of these holdings were fire sales of dubious restitution claims, and Harvard soon found itself in legal hot water. By 2015, Lipan had received a three-year suspended sentence for bribery and money laundering related to those deals, and Harvard was in court fighting for the legitimacy of its claims. The same year, the university, ready to wash its hands of the deal, found a willing buyer in Ikea. With an investment arm, the company purchased almost 34,000 hectares from Harvard. In 2016, it added another 12,800 hectares to its haul, bringing its holdings to 46,700 hectares in total. Today, the largest owner and operator of Ikea retail stores, Ingka Investments, has an estimated 50,000 hectares in its portfolio. As the holdings have changed hands, the stain of illegality has grown fainter and fainter. The company faces no serious risk of losing those holdings in court.
Ikea’s forests, too, are FSC-certified; those forests, too, have been sites of abuse. Not long before I arrived in Romania, a BBC crew found clear-cutting—not necessarily illegal but certainly not environmentally sound—in an Ikea forest in the northern province of Maramures. And despite having formally dissociated itself from HS Timber, Ikea was found to be selling concessions to that company to log its own forests as well.
I knew I had to see an Ikea-owned forest for myself; the challenge was finding one to safely visit. Any of the company’s vast holdings in Suceava seemed unwise after the attack; in neighboring Maramures county, where the forest ranger Pop had been murdered not two years prior, I was guaranteed to see clear-cutting, but it remained too dangerous on a workday.
I resolved, finally, to go to Focsani, near a lower-elevation forest where Ikea owns some 5,000 hectares, in a region where the company has also run into its greatest legal trouble. Barbu, the investigator, agreed to join me, as did Andrei, as part of his own research. Just a handful of months ago, Agent Green, the Romanian NGO, identified what it said was clear-cutting without a permit and without an environmental impact assessment in an Ikea-owned old-growth forest there, adjacent to the Valea Neagra Natura 2000 site, which held trees of 130 to 150 years old. I’d seen the photos of the Martian aftermath. The group had filed a complaint; the results had recently arrived.
On the drive in, we reviewed the auditor’s findings, compiled by Britain’s Soil Association, an FSC certifier. Despite the photographic evidence and the lack of an environmental impact assessment, the review found the company faultless. Andrei read aloud in disbelief. “They started logging here two years ago, and they still don’t have the permit. OK. And FSC doesn’t have a problem with that, doesn’t mention that they’re breaking the law. They’re just saying that they made ‘efforts’ to comply with the legislation.”
We drove through hills scarred not just with logging but with landslides. The soil here is thick with clay, which slides when its vegetation is removed, making future logging more difficult and regeneration of any sort harder still, a “nasty surprise” for Ikea’s designs on the area. Andrei laughed darkly. “They didn’t do their homework.”
When we arrived at the site, it was greener than I expected. Weeds and brush had broken up the most barren parts of the plot. A solitary surviving tree loomed. We counted a handful of oak saplings, none taller than shin-high. The most impressive growth came in the form of a tomato plant that had begun fruiting, likely a vestige of a logger’s lunch.
Because of the complaint, there had been plenty of public attention to the area, which, I was told, meant the site would be dormant. But as we walked around, we heard the distant, familiar warble of chain saws. More alarmingly, when the saws ceased, we heard the thump of trees meeting the forest floor, harder evidence of active logging somewhere nearby. Andrei launched the drone and spotted the operation just across the road from where we’d parked. “No fucking way,” Barbu said. “A lot of journalists have been covering this, and they have been coming to the area, so I think it would be foolish to, like, try something totally illegal.”
We walked around until we found phone service, and ran our coordinates through SUMAL, the online database, for active logging permits. One permit surfaced: for rarituri—the Romanian word for “thinning”—issued to Ingka Investments, Ikea’s retail ownership arm. The permit would allow loggers to remove small saplings, growth that might impede the overall well-being of the forest, as well as sick or dead trees. But even from hundreds of feet above ground, we could tell that that was not what was coming out. “These are also big, big logs. These are good commercial logs. This is not stuff you would take from rarituri,” Barbu said.
Deliberating, we came to a decision: We would enter the site, record the activity, and confront the loggers, with Barbu filming. Andrei texted our location to a colleague off-site as part of a safety protocol. To protect his undercover status, and to help facilitate a faster exit in case of emergency, he would stay in the car; Barbu—and by process of elimination I, too—would handle the confrontation. Getting footage of illegal logging like this would bolster a future case against Ikea’s forest management practices, but at some risk. “Fuck,” Barbu muttered, loading memory cards into his camera. “I don’t feel like getting beaten up.”
We loaded into the car and drove down to the clearing where the felled logs were being piled up. A rock was blocking the path. I got out of the car and threw it off the road.
Outside, Barbu began to film, narrating in Romanian and explaining in English for my benefit. Large, recently cut logs were piled behind a trailer. “Cut hours ago,” he added. On the far side of the clearing, we found a station where those logs were being split into cords for firewood. At the entrance to the forest, a large plaque announced the operation. Just as the database had indicated, it read RARITURI and INGKA INVESTMENTS. Nowhere did we see sickened-looking logs or saplings; putting some grade school wisdom to use, I counted rings that put the trees somewhere in the 80- to 100-year range. Absent, too, were the loggers we’d seen on the drone and expected to encounter.
Then I heard an engine coming not from the direction of the forest, but from the road behind us. A silver SUV pulled into the clearing, and Barbu went over to speak with the driver. The man claimed not to be associated with the logging operation, Barbu told me. But, troublingly, he also refused to move his car when Barbu pointed out that he was obstructing the only path from the logging site to the road. From that point on, we were blocked in.
A few minutes later, a red tractor emerged from the forest, dragging three large logs. “You ready for this?” Barbu asked me. We followed the logger on foot to the pile, where he idled the engine, exited the cab, and began to unchain the new logs. Camera rolling, Barbu gestured to the permit, the firewood cutting station, and the logs that had just been brought down. The logger yelled back. The villager got out of his Toyota and came over to film the conversation, too. I scanned for a rock to grab in case things turned. But numbers were on our side—the rest of the logging outfit remained in the forest—and the conversation never got violent. After a few minutes, the logger clambered back into the tractor and left. We, too, made our way back to the car.
“He was trying to tell me that even for thinning, you can still cut large, healthy trees accidentally,” Barbu recounted for me. “And I said, ‘Look, but this is a big pile of accidents.’ He said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s allowed. And if you need more answers, go to the management office.’” “Which is fair,” Andrei added, “because he only cuts what’s marked.” The management office, of course, is the Ingka regional office.
On my last day in Romania, I stopped by Ikea’s store in Bucharest, curious if there would be any indication of the company’s investment in the local environment, any display of its sustainability pledges in a country where they might actually be visible. Armed with the Google translate app, I skulked around the showroom floor, finding beechwood dining sets, spruce particleboard, and more, but no mention of the furniture’s hometown heritage. In the lobby, a display read, WE USE WOOD RESPONSIBLY. I left empty-handed, with no intention to return.
Ikea makes it difficult to trace the provenance of its furniture. Often an Ikea box will claim a country of origin that indicates only the last link in the manufacturing chain: MADE IN VIETNAM, for example. Sometimes it will tell you even less: MADE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION. Internally, however, the company closely tracks points of origin. A string of numbers on the box, inscrutable to the layperson, can indicate a particular manufacturer or contract within a country. Those codes remain fiercely guarded and are often changed, but in the course of my reporting, I was tipped off with the cipher for Plimob, the Ikea manufacturer in Romania that was recently exposed for using illegally logged wood in a number of Ikea’s low-cost, flagship chairs. I decided to return to Ikea once more, this time back in New York, in search of something that might fit the profile.
The loading bay of the Brooklyn warehouse was sparse by the time I got there. Particularly for popular, low-price items, inventory is often tough to come by at this store, which serves much of New York City. It was late November, and the snarls of the supply-chain crisis were still evident in the empty shelves.
Still, I found furniture made in Bulgaria and Poland and, finally, Romania. On a picked-over stack of green Rönninge chairs, one of the fancier makes, I spotted the Plimob code. The chair cost $95.
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