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“We’re through!” That is the first thing Arthur van der Veen says when he calls his friend and business partner Roelof Dirk Brouwer from the Czech Republic on Monday morning, 14 October 2019. The container filled with teakwood from Myanmar has passed Czech customs, the men have succeeded in getting the consignment into Europe. “Very nice, Arthur,” says Brouwer. “That’s just nice.”
The relief is great. Shortly before the phone call from the Czech Republic, Brouwer had been under stress for weeks. Customs had detained several containers of wood. Eventually they were released again, but the scare is there. The 60-year-old Brouwer has been importing Myanmese teak - the most sought-after type of wood for exclusive yachts because of its strength and appearance - for more than a decade.
Over the years, his work has become more difficult. The Dutch regulator NVWA has been chasing Brouwer and his business partners since 2015. They are suspected of importing illegal timber. To evade Dutch controls, the men defected to the Czech Republic in 2018.
Via that route, they manage to get the timber from Myanmar into Europe, because the Czech regulator does approve the batches of timber. Still, it eventually has to go to the Netherlands: it is destined for one of the world’s most luxurious yachts, according to NRC‘s investigation as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) international research project Deforestation Inc. The traders purchased the teak for a yacht from Dutch superyacht builder Oceanco in Alblasserdam, according to invoices, bills of lading, correspondence and transcripts of intercepted conversations accessed by NRC.
At the time, Oceanco was building a small number of superyachts, including one for the American film director Steven Spielberg and one for Jeff Bezos, co-founder of Amazon. For Spielberg, Oceanco is working on the Seven Seas, a 109-metre yacht named after his seven children. The showpiece, however, is the Koru for Jeff Bezos. It is the largest and probably most expensive sailing yacht ever built in the Netherlands: 127 metres long and with an estimated price of half a billion euros.
Behind luxury yacht building is a world of shady timber traders that is becoming increasingly inaccessible and criminal. The world’s best teak is scarce and comes from Myanmar. Teak is grown on plantations in numerous tropical countries, but that quality does not match the wood from Myanmar’s natural teak forests. And those who pay hundreds of millions of euros for a ship expect the very best.
But Myanmar suffers from fierce corruption, resulting in more logging than the government officially allows. Moreover, some of the proceeds from teak sales go to the military, which has been accused of serious human rights violations for decades, including by the United Nations. For instance, the military is held responsible for mass murder of the Rohingya and oppression of other minorities. Since the military coup in 2021, the military has been waging war against civilians demanding restoration of democracy. According to the US Treasury Department, the teak trade is a major source of revenue for the junta.
To combat global deforestation, the European Union Timber Regulation has been in force since 2013. It bans the import of illegally harvested timber, and requires traders to make every effort to rule out that the timber they bring into the European Union has been illegally harvested. Timber from Myanmar is looked at particularly strictly because it is very difficult to find out exactly where in the country it is cut. That information is often missing or incorrect.
Since 2017, it has been “impossible” to reduce the risk of teak from Myanmar being illegally harvested to a negligible level, European Commission experts judge. According to the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA), which monitors compliance with the timber regulation, this means in practice that legal imports of teak from Myanmar are impossible.
Myanmar is struggling with heavy deforestation. Between 2000 and 2020, it lost over 16,000 square kilometres of tropical forest
And so traders create detours to get the hardwood into the European market. They look for the member state that interprets European rules most leniently. The Netherlands, for example, has incorporated the European rules into its Penal Code, allowing offenders to face up to six years in prison. But in the Czech Republic and Croatia, penalties are limited to an administrative fine. Traders looking to get teak into the European market know exactly where the rules are weakest or enforcement is laxest.
In May 2019, Roelof Brouwer walks around northeast Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city with seven million inhabitants. On a street otherwise mostly occupied by sewing workshops, there are two large teak sawmills. Brouwer goes there several times a year, often with his business partner Enno P., director of timber trading company DMPT. Buyers from Dutch yacht builders, such as Royal Van Lent and De Vries Scheepsbouw, also often accompany him. Brouwer has good contacts with timber traders in Myanmar and Enno P. has those with yacht builders in the Netherlands. The pair represents the Dutch superyacht builders’ access to the best timber in the world. NRC was given access to the criminal file against them and Van der Veen and was thus able to meticulously describe the illegal teak trade.
In spring 2019, Brouwer is travelling with an employee of Teakdecking Systems, a US company commissioned to supply a ship deck to Oceanco. The two have to gather wood of the best quality for a mega order.
The men walk around the sawmills with the specifications for the superyacht exactly in their minds. They check the logs that have been cut down shortly before and rolled out of the forest by elephants with their trunks, or dragged out with chains attached to their bodies. Every board goes through their hands. That lath goes into the container, that one doesn’t. The thickness has to be just right. The sawing angle has to be right so that the grain runs exactly straight. There must be no knots. Everything has to match the ship’s construction drawings down to the last millimetre.
Tectona grandis wood from Myanmar is also known as the Rolls-Royce among woods. It is the absolute number one choice for the deck – or often the four or five decks – of luxury yachts. The soil in Myanmar contains a lot of the mineral silica, so the wood growing there is oily and hardly ever moulds or rots. It is non-slippery and it doesn’t get hot easily, so you can walk barefoot on the deck even in tropical temperatures.
Logs in a natural forest also grow more slowly than on a plantation, so the annual rings are closer together and the wood is stronger. And wild trees grow taller than plantation trees, allowing to cut longer planks. On a very large deck, that looks sleek.
But Myanmar is struggling with heavy deforestation. Between 2000 and 2020, it lost an area the size of half the Netherlands (over 16,000 square kilometres) of tropical forest, figures from Global Forest Watch show. Scientific research shows that the quality of the remaining forest is deteriorating in regions where a lot of teak is extracted.
Moreover, illegal logging often brings insecurity for civilians. The country is home to numerous ethnic groups, some of which have been fighting with the army, the Tatmadaw, for decades. In the process, serious human rights violations take place, including civilian deaths. According to NGOs, both local army units and rebel groups are involved in illegal logging. They earn money from it, which they use to fund the fighting.
Brouwer, for example, bought teak from Myanmar Rice Trading Company, a company that, according to the British NGO Environmental Investigation Agency, made donations to the Tatmadaw during the period when it launched a massive attack on the Rohingya.
To import teak to Europe, entrepreneurs must keep extensive records. They must be able to trace each log back to a stump in Myanmar’s forests.
Brouwer has commissioned thick volumes of paper work on the origin of the wood from Double Helix, a Singapore-based company that inspects teak from Myanmar. Double Helix has prepared a report of over two hundred pages to prove that the timber was harvested legally. It contains extensive spreadsheets of purchases, maps of logging areas, photos of sawmills and forest inspections, and several Myanmar government documents, handwritten in Burmese script.
But it is not enough. Ever since 2017, Brouwer has been getting inspections and the NVWA says imports from Myanmar are not compliant. Logging documents are missing and the various transport documents do not match. Brouwer, in short, cannot prove that the timber was harvested legally. He received several warnings, a penalty payme Source: NRC