Green criminals put together business worth $10b

Criminal syndicates are earning more than $10 billion a year from a booming environmental crime business in rainforest logging, the trade in endangered animal skins and ivory and smuggling canisters of banned gas refrigerants, it is claimed yesterday.

Environmental crime is a growing source of income for international gangs attracted by profit margins of up to 700 percent on illegal items such as tiger skins, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency. Yet the problem is being largely ignored by national and international crime fighting agencies, it says.

The UK-based charity has named several men it suspects of involvement in multimillion-dollar operations that have resulted in extensive environmental destruction, but who have not been successfully prosecuted. They include an Indian, Sansar Chand, who, according to an interrogation report from the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations, has sold more than 12,000 animal skins to Nepal-based traders.