Tiiiimberrr!

A Swedish near-billionaire who owns a logging company and acts as an environmental consultant to the British Prime Minister. How could anyone suspect a man like that of anything but the noblest agenda? Yet the Brazilian government did, and now that man, Johan Eliasch, is being fined $276-million for contributing to the destruction of the Amazon rain forests.

Having first raised Brazil’s ire in 2006 when, as co-founder of the conservation charity Cool Earth, he suggested the Amazon would be best protected by being bought in its entirety by foreign investors, the Swedish-born entrepreneur later surprised everyone by announcing he’d already bought 160,000 acres of it himself. Despite claiming the best intentions to maintaining the rain forest’s natural state, Eliasch also expressed the need to “develop the Amazon.” An investigation by the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources found that Eliasch’s company, Gethal, had cut down some 230,000 noble trees from a reserve area, failing to comply with Brazil’s laws for environmental protection.

Foreign ownership of the Amazon has long been a sore point for Brazil, and the animosity has been aggravated by recent reports showing most of the Amazon’s deforested areas are owned by outsiders.

by SCOTT SAXON