Alex Helan is a soldier in a new kind of war.

Slurping pork and noodles in a Chinese café in the Sarawak city of Kuching, the lean 26-year-old Englishman wearing shorts and flip-flops could pass as one of the thousands of young western travellers in Southeast Asia in search of authenticity and spiritual meaning. But Helan is searching for something else. He is an investigator for Global Witness, an NGO which has offices in London, Washington DC and Beijing, that's dedicated to exposing the economic networks behind conflict, corruption and environmental destruction.

It's spring 2012, and Helan is investigating the corrupt financial elites that have grown rich on the developing world's natural resources. Global Witness says the main players dispossess communities, steal political and economic power, fix elections, destabilise traditional social systems by introducing prostitution, alcohol and a cash economy, and establish front companies to shift profits offshore.


In the Malaysian state of Sarawak, the financial model for rainforest logging is so effective that conglomerates such as Samling and Shin Yang have exported the template around the world, operating directly or with associates in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia and Guyana. "Sarawak logging company operations cover 18 million hectares worldwide," says Helan, now 28. "They're logging, or converting forests into plantations, in at least 12 countries." Patrick Alley, cofounder of Global Witness, calls this lucrative business a "shadow system" that increasingly challenges his investigators' ability to track its rise.

Formed in 1993 to expose the use of natural resources to fund conflict -- originally the Khmer Rouge's logging trade across the Cambodia-Thailand border and blood diamonds in Africa -- it is now transforming to meet the challenge of a new, complex form of international finance. This year, the nonprofit received two prestigious international prizes: in March, Charmain Gooch, cofounder of Global Witness (Simon Taylor is the third cofounder), won the $1 million TED Prize. A month later the organisation was awarded the $1.25 million Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. "In all of our work essentially we look at how things are connected," says Alley. "What is it that enables the bad stuff to happen? Some of it is illegal and some of it is legal. They will need a network of lawyers and those lawyers, knowingly or unknowingly, are complicit in that activity. You'll need PR outfits, accountants, real-estate agents, corporate lobbying outfits -- a whole network of what in themselves are legal entities doing, for the most part, legal things. But all together [it] enables illegal deals. We have decided to try to dismantle that shadow system."

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Alex Helan and Rick Jacobsen find a broken-down Samling truck which has been accused of illegal logging Andrew Hetherington

Sarawak, the state that makes up the bulk of Borneo's northern half, is a prime example of this system at work. Its indigenous people -- the Penan, of whom 12,000 are estimated to remain in their traditional habitat -- are cursed by the fact that the trees they live among are perfect for the plywood required by the construction industry in Japan, where it is used to form moulds for poured concrete.


The Penan are nomadic hunter-gatherers: although they've lived in settlements since the 60s, they are still largely reliant on the forest. Under Sarawak law they have customary rights to their land through legislation that dates back to British rule in the 50s. "The government has largely ignored this," says Helan. "It awards concessions to logging companies then tells them to find out if there are any claims on the land. It's like putting the fox in charge of the hen house because they've got an incentive not to find any claims. And, even when the indigenous people do file injunctions, the state interferes, causes delays and is generally on the side of the logging companies."

One such company, Samling, has concessions covering about two million hectares, from which it annually removes two million cubic metres of timber. A September 2013 report produced by Global Witness identified "evidence of systematic illegal and destructive logging by two of Sarawak's largest logging companies, Samling Global and Shin Yang Group". Samling denied any involvement in illegal logging, stressing that its operations comply with government requirements. Shin Yang didn't respond to the allegations.

The flow of tropical timber from Sarawak to Japan is the largest in the world by value. Until recently, the Japanese have accepted wood that is logged illegally but marked as legal by a government-sanctioned scheme which pays no heed to outstanding land claims. Japan is rebuilding after the 2011 tsunami and Tokyo is hosting the Olympic Games in 2020, so demand for plywood in Japan is rising, which places the remaining five per cent of Sarawak's primary rainforest under dire pressure. Global Witness aims to protect it by targeting the system of kickbacks, tax avoidance and casual indifference to the law that it says facilitates logging.

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One man in particular is in its sights: Abdul Taib Mahmud, who served as Sarawak's chief minister from 1981 until March this year, and is now its governor. In that time he has privatised state assets and monopolies and handed them to his family to the point that Global Witness estimates Taib -- a member of Sarawak's dominant Melanau ethnic grouping -- and his associates and family control more than half a billion dollars worth of the nation's land assets. Taib has used this income to create a web of influence that is cemented by the parliamentary seats his Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu brings to Malaysia's ruling Barisan Nasional Party.


Nick Kelasau (left, standing), Helan and Jacobsen study satellite images of Samling operations with Penan residents of Long Lamai Andrew Hetherington

Helan wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Taib and his family and later lived as a teacher among the Penan. A few blocks from where he's eating noodles, a Melanau woman, Fatimah Abdul Rahman, entertains a British businessman on the fourth floor of a luxury hotel. Rahman is one of six sisters who control Ample Agro, a shell company that holds thousands of hectares of Sarawak rainforest. At ease on a sofa, she waves away any doubts the investor has about obtaining 5,000 hectares of rainforest to clear for palm plantation. "The Land and Survey Department issue the licence," Abdul Rahman explains in video footage shown to Wired. "But, of course, it is from the chief minister's directive." "Do you think he will agree to it?" asks the British businessman. "Yes," Abdul Rahman replies. "He's my first cousin, so it's quite easy."

Taib is also the man who rubber-stamped the deal that enabled the Abdul Rahman sisters to buy Agro Ample in 2010 for $300,000 (£179,000). The $3,320 per hectare price they are offering the British businessman means the sisters stand to make a profit of $16 million if the deal goes through.

Following the discussion with Abdul Rahman, the businessman meets the sisters' lawyer, Alvin Chong, in the Pulman Hotel. Helan shadows the palm-oil executive and waits in a car park below Chong's room. During the meeting, Chong details how Malaysian property gains tax will be avoided on the deal by having a two-tier payment process. "The nominal value will be paid here, the substantial value offshore," he says. And the fact that Malaysian law dictates 51 per cent of shareholders in Malaysian companies must be Malaysian citizens who must not hold shares in trust for outside parties? "We find some guys who are villagers and sign them for all this stuff," Chong says. "They won't know how to find a lawyer, would they? And we make sure the real shares are held in Singapore."

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Chong is also the legal representative of the state government of Sarawak and represents companies with direct links to Taib's family. In the car park below, Helan clenches his fist in victory: the businessman meeting Chong is, in fact, a Global Witness investigator conducting a sting operation. Helan has been listening in on his conversation with Chong, as he did with Abdul Rahman.

When footage of the interviews is released online it causes outrage around the world. It becomes known as the "Sarawak Sting".

It's April 2014, and Helan is back in Sarawak. Despite handing over the role of chief minister to his former brother-in-law Adenan Satem, Taib is not finished yet. "He has been obliged to move sideways," Helan says when Wired meets him in Miri, a jumping-off point for flights into Sarawak's interior. "He's governor now, a sort of constitutional monarch on the island. He has gone from chief minister for life to kind of self-appointed king, which potentially brings some protection from prosecution for what he has done."

The 1997 document, signed with the thumbprints of nine village headmen, outlining Long Kerong's claim of customary rights over the rainforest Andrew Hetherington

Helan is joined by another Global Witness worker, Rick Jacobsen.

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The pair have just spent three gruelling weeks tracking the destructive progress of Sarawak logging companies through the interior of Papua New Guinea. Still boyish at 42, Jacobsen is a freckled redhead from Idaho slathered in factor-50 Sun protector.

He opens his laptop and examines satellite images that track the spread of logging roads through the rainforest, pointing out the indicators of despoliation in an area designated by the Penan as part of their "Peace Park", meant to preserve virgin rainforest.

Jacobsen was planning to become a neuroscientist when a news report changed his life. "It was about how militia in the civil war in Sierra Leone had lined up the residents of a village and chopped their arms off at the elbow," he says. "I was upset, like everyone else, but I also realised that this was a conflict about resources.

I knew I had to do something to combat that. I had to take action."

After interning with Global Witness in Washington DC, Jacobsen was sent to Africa to research conflict issues such as the effect of rainforest logging. This is where he first encountered Sarawak loggers. "Companies linked to Samling arrived in Liberia in 2007," he says. "And they promptly discovered a loophole in the law that enabled them to get 15 per cent of the country's entire landmass in questionable allocations within two years."

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It's not just Liberia that has loopholes: Global Witness has found Sarawak companies currently logging or converting forests to plantations in at least 12 other countries. And it's not just forests: the exploitation of other natural resources creates similar problems around the world. Take the oil-rich but, for most of its four million inhabitants, impoverished Republic of the Congo. Denis-Christel Sassou Nguesso, son of the president, Denis Sassou Nguesso, took Global Witness to the high court for invasion of privacy after it revealed his purchasing habits when away from the mother country. "He simply went shopping with his country's oil money," Global Witness's executive director Gavin Hayman says. "He set up an account in Hong Kong via Anguilla, a British [banking] haven, and acted with utter impunity. The money could have been used to vaccinate thousands of children in the Congo against measles."

Taib is less rococo in his tastes, though he does have a weakness for big houses and, until recently, a fondness for a major British bank -- HSBC -- which reportedly provided Samling with financing for its logging operations in Sarawak.

A Samling logging truck spotted en route to Ba Jawi Andrew Hetherington

In April 2014, in an apparent about turn, HSBC notified all members of Taib family that they were no longer allowed to hold accounts with the bank. A little late in the day to rescue HSBC's reputation perhaps, but an instructive illustration of the links between exploitation of the developing world and the City of London. The bank, meanwhile, denies any wrongdoing. "Since 2011, HSBC has been systematically putting all of its businesses through strategic assessments. Our decision to wind down our commercial banking business in Sarawak followed a wide-ranging review of Malaysia and was a commercial decision," said an HSBC representative. "The shadow system is weird," Alley says. He claims Global Witness recently discovered that in several cases he was investigating, including money laundering from a Eurasian country and corrupt land-deals in Southeast Asia, the principles were represented by the same law firm based in London. "How does that work? Is there a law directory [of firms] for scuzz bags?"

Jacobsen is more measured in his language, employing phrases such as "doubtful legality" rather than "scuzz bag". He has become accustomed to the requirements of diplomacy, spending much of his time attempting to persuade Japanese buyers to insist that Sarawak's loggers both respect the rights of indigenous people and clearly mark the origins of their timber so illegal logging can be stopped at source. The campaign is beginning to take effect -- recently two large Japanese corporations, Sojitz and Itochu, sent management teams to Sarawak. Global Witness told them where the rules on extraction were being broken and where loggers were infringing property rights. The Japanese politely asked to see these areas. Their hosts, however, ensured they didn't. Jacobsen says the loggers went so far as to tell their Japanese guests that a long-planned field visit had to be cancelled because their helicopters were being overhauled.

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In the coming days Jacobsen and Helan will go where the Japanese didn't, to see for themselves the extent of the ongoing logging by Samling and others that is visible via satellite images. A Twin Otter flight takes us an hour south-east from Miri to a rainforest landing strip at Long Akah, from where we will travel on to Upper Baram, in the heart of Borneo's conservation area. The air route has a chequered record: in the last three years its services have variously come to grief by under-shooting the runway, landing in a ditch and, in October 2013, flying into a house causing two deaths.

Today it takes us over the lower reaches of the Baram River, which curls lugubriously through a plain that until the 80s was virgin rainforest. Now much of it has been cleared and palm plantations reach from the riverbank to the horizon -- a graph-paper grid of trees and water ditches. As the land rises into Borneo's central highlands, cultivated land is replaced by scrub, then woods and finally forest that parts to reveal a short landing strip. We're met by Nick Kelasau -- a whipcord-tough Penan activist in his late forties. It is a further two-hour drive by 4x4 to the riverside village of Long Suit. The only way to reach the deepest rainforest is by boat via the network of waterways in Upper Baram's valleys.

Long Suit is a Kenyah community, part of a group of villages that signed a goodwill agreement with Samling. Helan claims they received £3,000 a year to spread among the community in return for Samling extracting tens of millions of dollars' worth of timber.

Samling lorries laden with logs grind through the village, three sides of which has been cleared of forest. Kelasau and the Penan guides we meet here are not inclined to hang around: Long Suit offers an uncomfortable vision of what the future holds for their own communities upstream if Samling gets its way.

Sarawak governer Abdul Taib Mahmud's web of influence tends to cause discrepancies in local policy and law Andrew Hetherington

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The party wades out to long boats, six-metre plank canoes powered by an outboard motor. The despondency caused by Long Suit is forgotten after the first bend in the river: the group is suddenly in paradise. Yellow birds swoop above the water for insects; swifts dart through the treeline that tumbles down to the water's edge. Thirty metres above, the scene is patrolled by a sea eagle. After two hours the group reaches the Penan village of Long Sepigen. The atmosphere in the stilt dwellings is markedly different to Long Suit: wherever the Penan gather they break into laughter, but concern for the future is palpable. That night the village comes together in the house of the headman.

When the "Sarawak Sting" video went viral, the venality and corruption of those involved caused outcry around the world. In Sarawak, though, it was the casual racism displayed towards the Penan that fuelled outrage, in particular Chong's willingness to use them as dupes and Fatimah Abdul Rahman's reference to the indigenous people her schemes would dispossess as "pretty naughty people", implying claims for their statutory land rights were simply childish greed.

Legal claims haven't always been the Penans' only way to resist the encroachment of logging on their land. Disaffected by decades of destruction and feeling increasingly cornered, in 1987 they blocked logging roads in a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience. Up to 1,500 soldiers stormed barricades, beat and arrested people and bulldozed nomadic camps. Tear gas killed a four-year-old child.

Kelasau says his father, Kelasau Naan, was "the one who led the people, he set up the blockade against the loggers". After filing a lawsuit against Samling and the government he became a marked man.

One day in 2007 he went out into the rainforest to check his animal traps and never returned. After Kelasau filed a missing person's report, an agent from Samling arrived in Long Kerong offering financial help for the funeral, although no body had yet been found. Two months later, the villagers discovered his skull and other bones. The remains showed signs of trauma from a blade. Then a letter attesting that there was no foul play involved in his father's disappearance and bearing Kelasau's forged signature was sent to the police.

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The investigation is no nearer an arrest or prosecution now than it was then. Samling continues to try to access the land. Long Kerong and other villages have had a legal claim for customary rights to the forest of the Upper Baram in place since 1997: legally, while a claim is ongoing, logging cannot continue. But in reality it does, eating ever closer to the Penan's heartland.

In the meeting house of Long Sepigen's headman, candles are lit and a document is produced from a cupboard. Dated 1997, it bears the thumbprints of the nine village headmen who made the original claim. And there, towards the bottom of the document, is the mark of the headman of Long Kerong -- Kelasau Naan. The Penan are not given to emotional outbursts, and when confronted by his father's mark, Nick Kelasau simply says: "This is why I have to fight. He gave his life for our people."

The next day Kelasau takes the party to Long Kerong. It takes most of the morning travelling by boat and then a forest hike to get there. After fording the river that offers the village natural protection but would not stop the loggers' Caterpillar bulldozers, the group is greeted by locals with a forest meal: home-grown rice, stewed sago palm and a handful of jungle fern, which is bitter but rich in iron. Local people are reliant on the land, and live off their surroundings. WIRED's trip into dense steaming forest with an elderly hunter -- who didn't want to be named for fear of retaliation -- confirms this. Every tree and plant has a use. One might provide poison for blowpipe darts, another gives energy. Palm hearts offer nutrition on the move. The hunter points out a plant that, if chewed, provides an antidote to snake venom -- a recurring problem in the rainforest. Others provide dyes for clothes or medicine for stomach upsets. All this will go, along with the hornbill and the wild boar, the hunter says, if the loggers come.

In the 90s, when the fighting with the government was at its fiercest, the hunter was imprisoned for three and a half months. He still frowns at the memory of his cell. These days he hammers nails into trees: when the logs are processed in the sawmills, the nails break the blades. He doesn't want to hurt the workers, just persuade them to go elsewhere.

Helan and Jacobsen photograph a timber tycoon's mansion in Sibu, Sarawak Andrew Hetherington

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Helan and Jacobsen are here to see how far the loggers have encroached on his hunting grounds. Using a laptop, they scan satellite images for new logging roads and the bare hillside that show erosion of the topsoil. Technology is proving a vital tool for Global Witness: a few years ago, efforts to expose the shadow system in Sarawak would only have produced results if it could persuade a TV channel to help tell their story. "The sting in Sarawak could not have happened without people having access to it on YouTube," says Alley. "And then spreading the message by social media."

Today, following the clues shown on the satellite shots, they cross the Baram River on one of the prefabricated steel bridges the logging companies have erected in scores. Their 4x4 travels uphill, passing Caterpillar bulldozers clearing the landslides brought down by the loggers' unknitting of the terrain. Samling trucks come down the mountain loaded with 20 or more trunks, many of which Jacobsen notes are small -- which suggests that the area's bigger trees have already gone.

Half an hour later the team arrives at a roadblock outside a Samling logging camp. A steel gate has been erected across the road and a Samling manager -- ethnically Chinese, like many of Samling's workers -- comes out to talk with Kelasau. "I have been told that no white men are being allowed through today," he translates as it is made clear we will not be allowed through. "They knew you were coming." Behind the manager an assistant films Henan and Jacobsen, who is also recording the encounter. How word got out is unclear but, since the sting video circulated around the world, the airports in Sarawak have been under surveillance and the loggers have been especially sensitive to the presence of westerners.

Jacobsen is frustrated: he knows the company is conducting logging on the other side of the hill. Within an hour the team unexpectedly encounters a Samling logging camp: the mountaintop has been scraped away to reveal swathes of bare earth and felled tree trunks -- piled high as if a giant has been stacking matches -- are being lifted by Caterpillar trucks with grabbers and loaded on to queuing lorries. The scene is both breathtaking and obscene; even experienced campaigners such as Jacobsen and Helan pause before they capture the incriminating evidence with video and photographs.

Wired asked Samling to comment on the accusations from Global Witness in this feature but, at the time of going to press, had received no response.

Two days after leaving the forest, the Global Witness investigators sit in the Kuching office of See Chee How, a lawyer and elected member of the state assembly. Chee How can explain why the Penan's claim for their land has yet to be settled 17 years after it was made: another indigenous people, the Kenyah, have made a counter claim against the Penan, which means the case has been taken out of the state courts and shunted into the native courts.

Native courts have no power to judge non-native companies, so they have no power to stop logging. The case might never get to court, or not be heard until the forest has gone. And who encouraged the Kenyah claim? "The lawyers representing Samling represent the Kenyah intervenors," says Chee How.


An hour later a crocodile slides into the Kuching River.

Jacobsen and Helan are perched on the roof of a water taxi that cuts its engine to drift past the timber yards and plywood factories on the shore. Only one factory is pumping out the smoke that shows its is still at work -- the rest lie idle. "Plywood is a sunset industry in Sarawak," says Helan. "They're running out of rainforest to take."

In Liberia and the Congo basin alone, 50 million hectares of rainforest are under threat from industrial logging. If it's too late for Sarawak and the Penan people, then Global Witness will continue to fight where there is still hope.