“The secret deal to destroy paradise” is the third installment of Indonesia for Sale, an in-depth series on the opaque deals underpinning Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis.The series is the product of 22 months of investigative reporting across the Southeast Asian country, interviewing fixers, middlemen, lawyers and companies involved in land deals, and those most affected by them.“The secret deal to destroy paradise” is based on a cross-border collaboration between Tempo, Malaysiakini, Mongabay and Earthsight’s The Gecko Project. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia) Prologue: Johor Baru, 2012 In December 2012, at a press conference on the sidelines of an Islamic business forum in Malaysia, a man named Chairul Anhar made a bold claim. His company, he said, held the rights to 4,000 square kilometers of land for oil palm plantations in Indonesia. If true, it would make Chairul one of the biggest landowners in the country. That land was not just anywhere, but in New Guinea, a giant island that glittered in the eyes of investors. Shared by Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the island had the world’s biggest gold mine, untapped oil and gas, and the largest remaining tract of pristine rainforest in Asia. For the companies that had steadily logged their way through the rest of Southeast Asia, New Guinea was the last frontier. For the investor who could tame it, a fortune awaited. Then in his mid-40s, with a stout build, a thin moustache and a buzz cut, Chairul presented himself as such an investor. He claimed to be the president, CEO and owner of a sprawling conglomerate, the Menara Group. He traveled in a Bentley and private jets, and rubbed shoulders with the political elite of Malaysia and his native Indonesia. Chairul Anhar The basis of his claim was the Tanah Merah project, a plan to generate billions of dollars by logging untouched rainforests, home to indigenous tribes and a treasure trove of biodiversity, then razing what remained and replacing it with oil palms. If fully developed, it could become the single biggest palm oil plantation in Indonesia. But Chairul’s business, and his connection to the project, was more convoluted than the image he presented. The rights to the land in Indonesia’s Papua province had been acquired through a maze of shell companies. The shareholders were mostly fronts, controlled like puppets on a string. The companies were a façade, masking whoever was truly set to benefit from the project — whether Chairul or someone else. By the end of 2012, most of the equity in these shell companies — and with them the rights to the project — had been sold to offshore firms based in the Middle East and Singapore. Those sales channelled at least $80 million, likely several times more, back to the web of shareholders connected to Chairul, and brought a varied cast of new actors into the project: a former Indonesian chief of police, a secretive Yemeni family, a notorious logging firm from Borneo, and a conglomerate connected to a major Malaysian corruption scandal. The rainforest of Boven Digoel. Image by Nanang Sujana for The Gecko Project. By the time of the press conference, Chairul had only a slender claim to the land. He was the business Svengali who had brought these other interests together, generated a fortune, and lit the fuse on an environmental disaster that is only now beginning to unfold. The threat to the rainforests of Indonesia was very real. Since the turn of the century, only Brazil has lost more rainforest than Indonesia. One of the leading causes of this deforestation was a boom in industrial-scale plantations that began in the early 2000s. Those plantations enabled Indonesia to become the leading producer of palm oil, an edible oil used in an endless array of consumer products. But it also sparked an environmental crisis, as the carbon locked up in rainforests was released into the atmosphere. The volume of greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesian rainforests has made it a matter of international concern. Norway has pledged $1 billion in an attempt to incentivize reforms to curb them. Since 2015, the administration of President Joko Widodo has sought to rein in the plantation industry, most recently by enacting a temporary ban on any new permits for palm plantations. Though just a small proportion of the Tanah Merah project has been developed, the permits were issued before the ban came into force, and the forest remains slated for destruction. Today, an area larger than Manhattan has been cleared within the Tanah Merah project. This is only a fraction of the total project area. If the rest is bulldozed as planned, it will release as much emissions as Virginia produces by burning fossil fuels each year. If the giant sawmill that is today being constructed on the land is completed, it will suck in timber for years to come, settling the fate of swathes of rainforest in southern Papua. In the decade since the inception of the project, the ways in which the rights to it have been obtained and moved have been shrouded in secrecy. The companies involved have employed all of the tools of corporate secrecy that prevent key questions from being answered. Critical aspects of the permitting process that underpin the entire project are being withheld from public scrutiny. The true owners of the companies clearing the forest today remain hidden. A cross-border investigation involving news organizations from four countries — The Gecko Project, Mongabay, Tempo and Malaysiakini — attempted to pull back the corporate veil. We sought to find out who had obtained the rights to a project of such magnitude, and, perhaps more importantly, how. Our investigation exposes the methods apparently employed to ensure the people who control the fate of these forests — through their money, power and political decisions — have covered their tracks. Part One: ‘I wasn’t going to issue permits to just anyone’