Lee White, Gabon’s former Forestry Minister, accused of corruption and placed under house arrest

In 2019, White said he was “incorruptible”

Lee White, Gabon’s former Forestry Minister has been placed under house arrest. The former forestry director, Ghislain Moussavou, financial adviser Jean Guy Diouf, and inspector of services Ghislain Aimé Boupo were also arrested.

On 26 August 2023, a general election was held in Gabon. On 30 August 2023, incumbent president Ali Bongo was declared the winner with 64% of the vote. Shortly afterwards a group of Gabonese military officers staged a coup d’état and cancelled the election results.

“In the name of the Gabonese people … we have decided to defend the peace by putting an end to the current regime,” the officers said in a statement.

Ali Bongo and his father Omar Bongo had ruled the country since 1967. In 2021, The Economist wrote that,

The Bongo family has run Gabon as a patronage-ridden fief for 54 years; no one pretends it is a democracy. At its most recent election, in 2016, it was obvious that the main challenger, Jean Ping, had won hands down.

After the election, during the night of 31 August 2016, government forces shot and killed dozens of opposition supporters.

Yet in September 2019, not long after he was appointed as Forestry Minister, White claimed to have “worked with some remarkable heads of state”.

Those “remarkable heads of state” were Omar and Ali Bongo.

When Omar Bongo died in 2009, he was one of the richest men in the world. In addition to widespread government corruption, a 2008 US State Department report included the following about human rights in Gabon:

The country's human rights record remained poor. The following human rights problems were reported: limited ability of citizens to change their government; use of excessive force, including torture toward prisoners and detainees; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; an inefficient judiciary susceptible to government influence; restrictions on the right to privacy; restrictions on freedom of speech, press, association, and movement; harassment of refugees; widespread government corruption; violence and societal discrimination against women, persons with HIV/AIDS, and noncitizen Africans; trafficking in persons, particularly children; and forced labor and child labor.

House arrest

Agence Gabonaise de Presse, which is controlled by the post-coup Government, reported that the four arrested men, “appeared first before the prosecutor, then before an investigating judge who indicted them, before placing them under house arrest”.

Agence Gabonaise de Presse writes that,

According to the Public Prosecutor at the Libreville Court of First Instance, Andé Patrick Roponat, they are accused of misappropriation of public funds, forgery and use of forgery, extortion, association of criminals, violation of procedures for awarding forestry permits, complicity in illegal logging, removal of parts and money laundering.

On weekend before the election results were announced, the government shut down the internet and imposed a curfew. Al Jazeera journalist Catherine Soi, reporting from Kenya, said, “People are very afraid.”

The day before the election results were announced, White put out the following message:

Gabon’s REDD deals

At a meeting in New York in September 2019, White announced a US$150 million REDD deal with Norway through the Central African Forest Initiative.

White was appointed as Forestry Minister shortly after “kévazingogate” in which more than 350 containers of kévazingo, a reddish hardwood, were discovered at the port of Owendo, ready to be exported, in breach of Gabon’s 2010 log export ban. White helped to expose the illegal logging scandal.

When Le Monde asked White about kévazingogate and how he could guarantee to Norway that Gabon can control corruption, White replied,

“Sanctions have been taken and I have not spoken with Norway about corruption, but tons of CO₂ which we pledge to sequester to help stabilise the climate.”

When the first payment of US$17 million was made to Gabon, Joe Eisen, executive director of Rainforest Foundation UK, told Climate Home that CAFI paid Gabon “without the Gabonese government necessarily having taken any action whatsoever to reduce deforestation”.

“If anything,” Eisen added, “this seems like ‘payment for non-performance”.

Six months after Gabon received US$17 million from CAFI, Gabon’s park guards threatened to go on strike over poor pay, bad working conditions, and salaries being paid several months late.

In mid-2022, White announced that Gabon would generate 187 million carbon credits, 90 million of which would be sold on the offsets market.

At the same time, Gabon plans to continue logging its forests. Almost two-thirds of the roads in Gabon are logging roads and almost half of the country’s forests are timber concessions.

One of the logging companies operating in Gabon is Compagnie des Bois du Gabon. Its concessions cover an area of 600,000 hectares. Since June 2022, French oil giant TotalEnergies has owned 49% of the company.

TotalEnergies has been drilling oil in Gabon for more than 80 years and now plans to generate carbon credits from Compagnie des Bois du Gabon’s logging operations.

Another company, the African Conservation Development Group, has control over 731,000 hectares in Gabon. The company is developing a project called the Grande Mayumba project, consisting of commercial agriculture, forestry, and tourism.

An “illicit financing circuit”

When White was appointed Minister of Forestry in 2019, he told The Times,

“I have known the ministry for 30 years and am incorruptible, I know how it works and what needs to be done. If I can turn it around remains to be seen but at the moment it’s a mess.”

Le Monde reports that the arrests were related to a complaint by Gabon’s National Union of Water and Forest Professionals (Synapef) against the ministry’s forestry director, Ghislain Moussavou, who is accused of “complicity in illegal logging” and “embezzlement”.

Synapef accuses White of being the authoriser of an illicit financing circuit. Union spokesperson Maurice Steed Mve Akue told Le Monde that,

“We filed our complaint with the gendarmerie research department last May without receiving a response. But the context has changed and we have relaunched our action because the justice system now has more room to manoeuvre to do its work.”

Synapef alleges that the ministry collected fines imposed on forestry operators and revenues from the sale of abandoned wood. The money, which would normally be paid into the ministry’s account with the Public Treasury, were paid into a separate account with the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.

The money amounted to several hundred thousand dollars according to Synapef’s allegations.

Olam’s concessions

Another part of Synapef’s complaint concerns the allocation of two forestry concessions to the Special Economic Zone of Gabon, which is a joint venture between the Gabonese State and agribusiness giant Olam. The concessions were allocated without call for tenders.

Ali Bongo’s son Noureddin Bongo Valentin was Director General of Olam Gabon until he was appointed as general coordinator of presidential affairs by his father in December 2019. Noureddin Bongo Valentin was arrested during the coup d’état, accused of treason and corruption.

In December 2016, Mighty Earth filed a complaint with the Forest Stewardship Council, arguing that Olam had cleared an area of forests larger than 10,000 hectares in the past five years, thus putting the company in breach of FSC’s Policy for Association.

In April 2020, following a series of negotiations between Mighty Earth and Olam facilitated by the World Resources Institute, FSC hired a company called SmartCert Group to take a look at Olam’s destructive operations in Gabon.

Three years later, the Executive Summary of SmartCert’s report was been made public. It states that,

The results indicate that OPG [Olam Palm Gabon] converted 24,133 ha of natural forest into oil palm plantations within the 5-year period January 2012 to December 2016, which exceeds the FSC Policy for Association Conversion threshold of more than 10,000 ha of forests under the organization’s responsibility.

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