Brazil’s environmental agency identified more than 220 companies involved in schemes designed to cover up illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest, Reuters reported.
The environmental agency, Ibama, will place embargoes on the identified companies to stop them from selling wood and will issue more than $8.76 million in fines. Many of the companies were caught doing business with or hiding behind shell companies created to insert illegally harvested wood into the legal timber supply chains.
The discovered scheme involved more than 102,000 cubic meters of illegally harvested wood, representing a forest area larger than Manhattan, according to the report. An environmental expert called the catch “a drop in the ocean.”
The full report can be found here.
