London Carbon Credit Company: Another carbon credit boiler room bites the dust
- Details
- Category: Tanzania
- Published: 21 August 2013
London Carbon Credit Company was exposed as a scam by Daily Mirror journalist Andrew Penman in August 2012. Last month, Penman reported that the company has been wound up in the public interest in the High Court in London.
According to a press release from the Insolvency Service, in the less than two years that the company existed, London Carbon Credit Company managed to collect £1.7 million from investors. The company sold the carbon credits, “at an inflated price with an excessive mark up”. Even if a market did exist to sell voluntary carbon credits, investors would have been unable to do so because London Carbon Credits Company “failed to provide identifiable carbon credit certificates”.
Read more...
More corruption involving Norwegian REDD funding in Tanzania?
- Details
- Category: Tanzania
- Published: 21 August 2013
In 2006, an evaluation of Norwegian aid to Tanzania revealed that about US$30 million had been lost to corruption and mismanagement in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. The money was about half of the total that Norway spent on a Management of Natural Resources Programme. This week, Norwegian aid is in the headlines again over allegations of corruption in Tanzania.
Norway supported the MNRP from 1994 to 2006 to the tune of US$5 million a year. An independent evaluation in 2006 found that money was syphoned off through buying overpriced or non-existent goods and services. Procurement rules were not followed. More than half of Norway’s money went on workshops and “capacity building” exercises. Large amounts of money were lost to the “per diem culture” that surrounds aid-agency funded workshops in Africa. Norway stopped aid to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. But after Tanzania returned a small part of the missing money, Norway turned the aid flow back on, committing US$100 million over five years for forest climate projects in Tanzania.
Clinton Foundation on London Carbon Credit Company: “This matter is a known fraud”
- Details
- Category: Tanzania
- Published: 21 August 2013
Last week, REDD-Monitor wrote about a London-based company that claimed to be in “advanced negotiations” to be “sole UK provider of carbon credits” from Clinton Foundation forestry projects. The company listed two Clinton Foundation projects on its website.
REDD-Monitor wrote to the Clinton Foundation to ask about London Carbon Credit Company’s claims. Yesterday, D. James Baker, Director, Global Carbon Measurement Program at the Clinton Foundation replied:
WWF scandal (part 3): Embezzlement and evictions in Tanzania
- Details
- Category: Tanzania
- Published: 21 August 2013
WWF is embroiled in a two-part scandal over its work in Tanzania. In October 2011, thousands of villagers were evicted from a WWF project area in the Rufiji Delta. This year WWF Tanzania staff were caught embezzling funds.
On 28 October 2011, forestry officials protected by armed police burned down hundreds of farm huts and cut down villagers’ palm trees. The huts were used to plant and harvest rice. The government had announced the planned evictions in January 2011. One of the people affected, was Bakari Wanga, chairman of Kiomboni village, one of three villages in the Rufiji Delta. “What is happening here is absolute madness, our huts are being torched and coconut trees felled by a group of natural resources officials escorted by the police,” Wanga told the Daily News.
Read more...
Green Resources’ carbon plantations in Tanzania: Curse or cure?
- Details
- Category: Tanzania
- Published: 21 August 2013
A recent report gives a critical view of the Clean Development Mechanism in Africa. The report, “The CDM in Africa: Can’t Deliver the Money”, draws together a dozen researchers under the guidance of Patrick Bond of the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa.
One of the chapters in the report, co-authored by Adrian Nel and Kadija Sharife, looks at a Norwegian company called Green Resources AS and its plantation operations in Tanzania.
Green Resources was founded by Norwegian forestry analyst Mads Asprem in 1995. According to the company website, it employed 5,300 people at the end of 2010 and has invested US$100 million in its operations in Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Southern Sudan.
Read more...
