Why the lease changes were illegal
Under Russian law, you can’t chop down a forest just because
a bureaucrat lets you.58 A careful
assessment of how much logging is sustainable is first carried out. Public
auctions then determine who receives the rights to harvest the chosen trees,
and you can’t change how you bid – or, in normal circumstances, what you are
bidding on – even if the other side agrees to it.59
These rules form part of the country’s Forest Code. Until
October 2015 this stated that forest lease agreements could only be altered to
prevent a wildfire emergency arising, or if fires suddenly wreaked havoc on forests
under the hammer before a deal was struck. Neither circumstance applied in
these cases.
By hiking up the volume of timber allowed to be cut and
changing the rent charged on the leases, the leaseholder (Bakurov’s companies)
and the regional forest management body had in effect signed an entirely new
contract without conducting an auction, thereby breaking wider laws requiring
open competition.60 This was the case
with the first three of the 11 now-rescinded additional forest lease agreements
that Bakurov’s companies signed with Irkutsk province’s forest management
agency.
Revisions to the Forest Code introduced in October 2015
allowed some haggling over forests already auctioned, including in the event of
fires, floods and other natural disasters, but this could only be brought about
by a court ruling.61 The eight
additional amendments signed after the new Forest Code took effect bypassed
this process.
In six of the 11 lease amendment cases, the court records
also document other wrongdoing, including absent, inaccurate or falsified
forest pathology reports used to try to justify the sanitary logging.62
