Illustration created with assistance from ChatGPT / DALL·E by OpenAI
This summer marks 10 years since Earthsight began exposing crime and corruption linked to global commodities through undercover investigations and deep analysis of supply chains – from illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon to smuggling sanctioned Russian timber into Europe.
Explore a decade of our most impactful investigations.
Indonesia for Sale: October 2017
Indonesia for Sale was an investigative series published in partnership with Mongabay. It was originally published under The Gecko Project brand, which later became an independent organisation. It explored the corruption underpinning Indonesia’s land rights and deforestation crises. Built around three main case studies where local people’s lands were stolen for the development of palm oil plantations, the series was supported by short films and picture stories, and included a series of articles outlining the policy implications of our findings.
The series received high-profile attention internationally and in Indonesia. The films and written stories were viewed millions of times. The final instalment, The secret deal to destroy paradise, which exposed the corruption behind the vast Tanah Merah oil palm project, made the front page of Indonesia’s leading news magazine, Tempo.
Complicit in Corruption: July 2018
For two years, we investigated illegal logging and timber corruption in Ukraine and tracked their connections to EU markets. Complicit in Corruption: How billion-dollar firms and European governments are failing Ukraine's forests revealed how illegality permeated the timber supply chain in Ukraine from harvest to export. On-the-ground investigations indicated that 40 per cent of the timber produced by the country's state-owned enterprises was illegally cut through the abuse of a loophole that allowed trees to be harvested to prevent the spread of disease.
The EU was by far the largest destination for these Ukrainian wood exports, representing 70 per cent of the total. EU purchases exceeded €1 billion in 2017.
IKEA Investigations: June 2020/July 21
Our June 2020 IKEA investigation, Flatpacked Forests, unpacked the illegal timber problem of the world's largest furniture retailer and the flawed green label behind it.
Over 18 months, we went on the trail to investigate IKEA's Ukrainian timber purchases. Using official files, on-the-ground reporting, satellite imagery and whistleblower accounts, our researchers followed supplies of suspect wood from Ukraine’s precious Carpathian forests to IKEA stores in the UK, the US, Germany and elsewhere.
In July 2021, House of Horrors revealed that IKEA had been selling children's furniture made from wood linked to large-scale illegal logging in protected Russian forests for years.
The items we identified as tainted with illegal wood included the FLISAT doll's house and the brand's popular Sundvik children's range. Our report estimated that IKEA had sold a product containing the suspect Russian lumber every two minutes.
Earthsight’s investigators were able to link IKEA wood products to forests in remote Siberia thanks to undercover meetings, visits to logging sites, satellite imagery analysis and scrutiny of official documents, court records and customs data.
Grand Theft Chaco: September 2020
Grand Theft Chaco linked the illegal clearance of Paraguayan forests inhabited by one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes to some of Europe’s biggest car manufacturers. The clearances occurred in the Gran Chaco, a precious bioregion home to jaguars and giant anteaters with one of the highest deforestation rates on earth. Cattle ranching to meet international demand for beef and leather is one of the major drivers of this deforestation.
Earthsight identified the cattle ranches that had illegally cleared forest inhabited by the Ayoreo Totobiegosode – the only indigenous people living in voluntary isolation anywhere in the Americas outside the Amazon rainforest. Our investigators discovered which slaughterhouses were buying cattle from these ranches in Paraguay and traced the supply chains carrying hides to tanneries in Italy – the world’s main destination for Paraguayan leather. During undercover visits, the tanneries concerned bragged of supplying several famous car manufacturers, including BMW and Jaguar Land Rover.
Taiga King: December 2020
Spies. Lies. Lumber. Taiga King revealed how European firms fed a Russian tycoon's billion-dollar illegal logging scam.
Alexander Pudovkin is the Taiga King. The boss of timber giant BM Group, Pudovkin oversaw one of Russia's largest logging scandals. Loggers used their powers to plunder precious taiga forests, which were home to brown bears, wolves and lynx. They harvested illegal wood with a retail value exceeding €870 million ($1 billion). Much of the suspect timber was destined for Europe.
Our year-long investigation charted the rise and extraordinary fall of the BM Group empire and how a botched sawmill project in far eastern Russia brought Pudovkin's house of cards crashing down, as well as secret service agents to his door.
There will be blood: May 2022
There Will Be Blood, a joint investigation with Brazilian agribusiness watch group De Olho nos Ruralistas, linked chicken and pet food sold by major European fast-food and supermarket chains – including KFC, Lidl, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Netto and Edeka – to the brutal repression of the Guarani Kaiowá indigenous people in Brazil.
The report exposed the soy farm occupying the ancestral land of the Guarani Kaiowá, who were violently evicted from it decades ago and still suffer the consequences of forced displacement. While the murderers of prominent Kaiowá leader Marcos Veron have enjoyed impunity for over 20 years, the soy from the farm finds its way into chicken and pet food supply chains – through animal feed – reaching household retail names in Europe.
The Fixers: September 2022
From the unique Atlantic Forest to the Amazon, our investigation in partnership with Mongabay revealed how Indusparquet, Brazil's largest flooring company, had been pouring into the US market with exotic wood flooring linked to illegal logging in Brazil.
Through a series of case studies, The Fixers begins in the Brazilian state of Paraná. Our investigators used leaked wiretap recordings and court records to uncover how a public official at the state’s Environmental Institute illegally procure a wood species endemic to the threatened Atlantic rainforest.
The following chapter focuses on a former federal environmental agent in São Paulo, who was bribed to manipulate permits in the national database. This is followed by two case studies in Pará, highlighting how loggers have threatened uncontacted Indigenous communities in the Ituna Itatá territory, and detailing a Federal Police operation that exposed bribery and illegal activities linked to the former Minister of Environment under Bolsonaro.
Rubber-stamping Repression: November 2022
Our report exposed how Europe’s largest furniture retail chains had been profiting from the torture of political prisoners in Belarus; their purchases enriching the country’s brutal dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, at the expense of some of Europe’s last primal forests. The trade supported Russian terror in Ukraine, in which Belarus is heavily complicit.
We connected forced prison labour to furniture sold at almost every major furniture retail chain in Europe, all leading back to XXXLutz, the second-largest furniture retailer on the continent. IKEA furniture linked to the scandal was also sold in the USA.
Fashion Crimes: April 2024
We revealed that the world’s largest fast-fashion brands, H&M and Zara, were using cotton produced by farmers linked to land grabbing, illegal deforestation, violence, human rights violations and corruption in the Brazilian Cerrado.
Our investigators spent over a year going undercover at global trade shows and analysing satellite images, court rulings and shipment records. Fashion Crimes highlighted H&M and Zara’s reckless reliance on Better Cotton, a certification label that had consistently failed to detect illegalities and unsustainable practices in cotton supply chains.
Following publication, Earthsight heard from inside sources that the report had prompted intense conversations within the cotton and fashion industries. It also led Better Cotton – under pressure from fashion brands – to conduct an investigation and put in place an action plan to address shortcomings in its Brazil programme.
Blood-stained birch: January 2025
A nine-month undercover investigation revealed widespread laundering of Russian and Belarusian timber into the EU in breach of sanctions put in place in response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
‘Blood timber’ with a retail value of over €1.5bn was estimated to have entered the EU since sanctions took effect in July 2022. The report prompted the EU Commission to issue an enforcement alert on suspected Russian birch plywood, and led to enforcement actions in at least two European countries, including Greece and Estonia. The EU Parliament also took up one of the report's recommendations calling for stronger sanctions on Russian and Belarusian wood.
