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Money Logging investigates what Gordon Brown has called "probably the biggest environmental crime of our times" – the massive destruction of the Borneo rainforest by Malaysian loggers. Historian and campaigner Lukas Straumann goes in search not only of the lost forests and the people who used to call them home, but also the network of criminals who have earned billions through illegal timber sales and corruption.
Straumann singles out Abdul Taib Mahmud, current governor of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, as the kingpin of this Asian timber mafia. Taib's family-with the complicity of global financial institutions- have profited to the tune of 15 billion US dollars. Money Logging is a story of a people who have lost their ancient paradise to a wasteland of oil palm plantations, pollution, and corruption-and how they hope to take it back.
Translated from the German edition.
Lukas Straumann is the executive director of the Bruno Manser Fund in Basel, Switzerland.
"A unique way of life in the rainforests has been destroyed in a single generation. Read this book and weep. But then get angry."
- Wade Davis, Bestselling author of Into the Silence
"One of the most comprehensive and brutally honest investigations into the intrigues of the Malaysian and international timber mafia."
- Süddeutsche Zeitung
"In thrilling chapters historian Lukas Straumann gives the portrait of a clan of kleptocrats, who, through the granting of timber concessions and export licenses, have managed to become billionaires."
- Neue Zürcher Zeitung
