Report Says Loggers Declaring Losses But Increasing Exports

By Franklin Kolma

A high-end investigative report has revealed that despite decades of operating in PNG, logging companies barely declare profits.

Furthermore, the report reveals an odd financial contradiction where loggers have reported doubling their losses while continuing to increase their exports of tropical timber.

In a comprehensive report furnished by renowned international researching group The Oakland Institute, new evidence of financial misreporting and grand scale tax evasion in the PNG logging industry have been unearthed.

Titled “The Great Timber Heist-Continued: Tax Evasion and Illegal Logging in PNG”, the institute makes public a host of new case studies that have been ascertained through the study of sixteen subsidiary logging exporters.

Following a 2016 report of the same nature which alleged that financial misreporting by foreign firms resulted in nonpayment of hundreds of millions of kina in taxes, the new report reveals an apparent worsening of this pattern in recent years.

According to financial records, the 16 studied subsidiaries of a logger that court injunctions hinder us from naming, have doubled their financial losses in just six years while increasing their exports of tropical timber by over 40 per cent.

Policy Director of the Oakland Institute and author of the report Mr Frédéric Mousseau told this paper that it was highly unlikely that companies reporting consistent losses year after year would increase their production.