Money Logging: On the Trail of the Asian Timber Mafia
Money Logging: On the Trail of the Asian Timber Mafia
With
Lukas Straumann
Author, Executive Director of the Bruno Manser Fund
Clare Rewcastle
Founder of Radio Free Sarawak / Sarawak Report, London
Richard Harvell
Executive Editor, Bergli Books, Basel
Message to the UN from the Borneo rainforest by a Penan delegation from Sarawak, Malaysia
Money Logging investigates what former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called ‘probably the biggest environmental crime of our times’—the massive destruction of the Borneo rainforest by Malaysian loggers.
Historian and campaigner Lukas Straumann goes in search not only of the lost forests and the people who used to call them home, but also the network of criminals who have earned billions through illegal timber sales and corruption. Straumann singles out Abdul Taib Mahmud, current governor of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, as the kingpin of this Asian timber mafia, while he shows that Taib’s family—with the complicity of global financial institutions—have profited to the tune of 15 billion US dollars. Money Logging is a story of a people who have lost their ancient paradise to a wasteland of oil palm plantations, pollution, and corruption—and how they hope to take it back. Books will be sold at the event.