Andrew Skeene and Omari Bowers ran a company called GFI Consultants Ltd. They used the name Global Forestry Investments and claimed to offer an “ethical and financially rewarding investment” in teak plantations in Brazil.
Category: UK
German prosecutors seek arrest of Peter Virdee (AKA “Batman”) for €125 million carbon credit VAT fraud
Prosecutors in Frankfurt am Main announced this week that they are seeking the arrest of a 46-year-old British businessman charged with running a criminal gang that pocketed €125 million via a carbon credit VAT carousel fraud.
Carbon offsets: Australian airline Qantas makes misleading claims about “empowering rainforest communities”, while making the climate crisis worse
In October 2019, Andrew Penman, a journalist at The Mirror contacted REDD-Monitor. I’d been in touch with Penman a few times in the past, mainly because he’s one of the few journalists in the UK who has regularly exposed the boiler room scams selling carbon credits as investments to retail investors.
Action Fraud is, er, a fraud
Action Fraud is “the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime”, according to its website. Victims should report fraud to Action Fraud, and reports are passed on to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.
Indonesia’s Katingan REDD project sells carbon credits to Shell. But that doesn’t mean the forest is protected. It’s threatened by land conflicts, fires and a palm oil plantation
The Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation Project covers an area of about 150,000 hectares in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. The project was created in 2007 by an Indonesian company called PT Rimba Makmur Utama. The director of the company is Dharsono Hartono.