By Chris Lang
World Wide Carbon LLC was a company registered in Atlanta in the US. From 2013 to 2018, the company claimed to sell investments related to carbon credits. In total seven victims handed over US$1.7 million. On 1 December 2020, in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Mark H. Loewen, a director of World Wide Carbon, pleaded guilt to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
According to court documents, Loewen and others at World Wide Carbon told investors that their money would be invested in carbon credits. They promised investors returns of between 5% and 20%. In fact, the money was not used to buy carbon credits. Loewen personally received more than US$310,000 of investor funds.
In July 2020, Henry Alexander McLarty, Sr. also pleaded guilty to his involvement in the World Wide Carbon scam. His sentencing is due on 20 January 2021.
World Wide Carbon was a Ponzi scheme – any money returned to investors came from other investors’ money. World Wide Carbon encouraged investors to find new investors and paid them a commission for doing so. World Wide Carbon paid these commissions from existing investors’ funds, not returns on investments.
World Wide Carbon claimed to have a reinsurance policy with Lloyd’s of London. No such reinsurance policy existed.
World Wide Carbon issued Compliance Instrument Tracking System Service account statements to investors that were supposed to show their ownership of carbon credits. The statements were fabricated.
Court documents report that in August 2015, Loewen explained the World Wide Carbon investment to one of the victims as follows:
- Investments will be “initially deposited into WWC’s client funds account” with Bank of America, then “invested in a portfolio of specific carbon credits that have been developed, established, and validated by WWC.”
- The carbon credits are then “registered” with the CARB [California Air Resources Board] and “held in WWC’s Market Program Participants account. . . .”
- The Air Resources Board Offset Credits “have been verified by an independent verifying group,” as well as the CARB, “prior to the WWC verification in tandem with Lloyds of London.”
- The investor’s credits “are then sold at the next available AB32 quarterly auction.”
- Return on the investment of 5.0% quarterly.”
All of these statements were false. The victim invested US$300,000 in World Wide Carbon. By March 2016, the victim asked for the return of US$100,000 of his investment. Loewen made excuses and did not return the money. The victim frequently asked for his money, but World Wide Carbon did not return any of the money.
Loewen faces sentencing in April 2021. The maximum penalty is 20 years in prison although a Department of Justice press release about Loewen’s guilty plea notes that, “Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties.”
Carbon International
Before World Wide Carbon, Loewen ran another company supposedly selling carbon credits, called Carbon International LLC. In an August 2012 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Loewen described his company as a “$1 million-a-year business” with a staff of 41. The article reported that Loewen’s company “has rights reserved for about 300,000 acres of pine forests in Georgia and 3.9 million acres of forest worldwide.”
A year earlier, a timberland owner posted a warning on Ripoff Report about Carbon International and Loewen:
[T]he more we asked questions, the more Mr. Loewen seemed to try to dance around the answers. The specific question danced around the most was to speak with someone who had received a check from a carbon offset. He never would provide one.
In November 2011, another of Loewen’s companies, this one called World Carbon LLC put out a “Private Placement Memorandum”:
In the Memorandum, World Carbon made the following claim:
World Carbon currently has offset liquidation rights to over 3.9 million acres of forestry, with an expected annual yield of 23.4 million environmental “VER’s”, or verified emission reduction units {carbon credits}. The market value is approximately $234,000,000 annually with exclusive contracts when acreage has been certified and brought to market. The nucleus of World Carbon revolves around the global need to reduce greenhouse gases through the execution of GHG sequestration and mitigation projects and the development, monitoring and reporting of small to large-scale sustainability initiatives for emitters of any size.
World Carbon LLC still exists, and the company filed its annual registration on 30 April 2020.
World Wide Carbon LLC
World Wide Carbon LLC was registered in Georgia on 4 January 2012.
The company’s website (wwcarbon.com) is no longer available, but archived copies are available here and here.
On its website, the company made the following claim:
World Wide Carbon, LLC was founded on the premise that a company can be both socially responsible and profitable. We partner with our clients to develop turn-key carbon sequestration programs that are both environmentally beneficial and financially rewarding. Our team of experts design and implement large-scale carbon sequestration programs and provide on-going management to industry-best standards.
World Wide Carbon claimed to run Improved Forest Management projects on 850,000 hectares of Boreal forest and 400,000 hectares “of forestry and emission reduction credits in Brazil and the United States utilizing unique IFM planting of teak and eucalyptus trees”. The website stated that, “Our current projects generate over 30,000,000 carbon credit offsets annually with a current market value of over $530,000,000.”
World Wide Carbon is included in the International Database on REDD+ Projects, set up by Chaire Economie du Climat, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (Cirad), and the Institut Français des Relations International (IFRI). According to the REDD+ Database, World Wide Carbon’s planned project name is “Latin America 1” and covers 1,343,185 hectares. The project is supposed to have started in 2012. The project description on the REDD+ Database states:
Latin America 1 project was initiated by the indigenous peoples of the specific area to guarantee the protection of their lands threatened by colonization occurring in the region. The Latin America 1 project will dramatically reduce deforestation in the region by increasing surveillance and monitoring in the rain forest as well as benefiting local communities. Carbon creditsare planned to be sold on the International markets, as “the only alternative for obtaining economical resources to finance control and surveillance actions.”
All of which, of course, is pure fiction.
In May 2017, Native American Venture Fund put out a press release that stated that,
The Native American Venture Fund (NAVF) and World Wide Carbon WWC ACCF Global Management (WWC) announced today that they have entered into a futures buying agreement for up to 360 million carbon offsets/credits annually over a 10-year period. The market value of the volume of aforementioned credits would be over $2.5 billion USD — indexed to the current listing floor within the California Allowance Mandatory marketplace.
REDD-Monitor wrote to John Cataldi, Managing Partner of NAVF, to ask about this US$2.5 billion deal. He did not reply.
Compass Carbon
The day after Loewen pleaded guilty in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a company called Compass Carbon LLC was registered in Wyoming.
Compass Carbon’s website was registered anonymously on 9 November 2020.
The website is almost identical to World Wide Carbon’s website – a key difference being that Mark Loewen is not listed as a team member.
UPDATE – 22 December 2020: Kurt Kaiser, Director of Compass Carbon, responded to the inclusion of his company in this post. You can read his response here, along with some questions that REDD-Monitor has for Kaiser:
