The Blattner family’s Isangi REDD project in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been cancelled

Will Verra and the DRC government allow the Tshopo Lomami REDD project, the Blattner family’s next REDD boondoggle, to go ahead?

The Isangi REDD covered an area of 187,571 hectares in Tshopo Province in the north central part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The project was previously part of two logging concessions run since 2004 by Société Africaine de Bois (Safbois). In 2009, the carbon rights to what was left of the forest, after five years of industrial logging, were transferred to a US-based company called Jadora LLC.

According to the Project Description Document,

Jadora entered into an agreement with Safbois in September 2009 to be the sole project developer for the Isangi project in exchange for in-country (DRC) logistical support during the project’s development and a revenue share of the sale of carbon credits resulting from the development of the project.

Safbois has three shareholders: Daniel Blattner, David Blattner, and James Blattner. The three are brothers from the US. The Blattners also control Jadora.

The Blattner family

Investigative journalist Linda Ngari recently wrote two articles for Africa Uncensored about the Blattner family and the Isangi REDD project.

As well as carbon trading, the Blattner family is involved in companies carrying out mining, banking, logging, electricity distribution, construction, and air transport operations.

Compagnie Africaine d’Aviation is one of DRC’s largest airlines. The company’s shareholders are Daniel and David Blattner. They also own the World Leasing Company, an aircraft leasing company. One of Ngari’s articles includes a list of 41 companies linked with the Blattners that have operated in DRC in the last 20 years.

Ngari writes that,

[T]he Blattner family benefited from a corporate game of musical chairs . . . profiting through more than five companies that deal in carbon offsetting, all of which are registered at the same address in Florida, U.S., while simultaneously managing conservation and logging projects spanning over 565,000 hectares, with little compensation to the indigenous communities.

The Blattner family moved to what was then Zaire as long ago as 1960.

By 1989 when Elwyn Blattner, then 33-years-old, was profiled by the New York Times he owned a Goodyear tire factory, Kinshasa’s only slaughterhouse, a canning factory, as well as rubber, coffee and palm-oil plantations.

Blattner bought up land and companies under the kleptocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. Often the companies had been seized from their Belgian owners by the dictator.

But the plunder of DRC’s resources did not end after Mobutu’s exile from DRC.

Both of the Safbois logging concessions were awarded after a 2002 moratorium on the allocation of new logging concessions. (By 2008, the government had awarded more than 100 logging concessions, covering a total area of 15 million hectares — all in breach of the logging moratorium.)

An August 2007 field mission carried out by Global Witness and the Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation, Water and Forests found that Safbois was logging in villager’s fields near Yafunga, 16 kilometres outside the area it should have been logging in that year.

The field mission uncovered six violations of the Forest Law. Employees had not been paid for three months. Worker safety and health conditions were “glaringly inadequate”.

A Greenpeace report dated October 2008, reported that earlier that year about 2,000 villagers surround the company’s compound in Yafunga. They demanded compensation for use of community land, construction of a school and health clinic, road improvements, and the hiring of local people. When their demands were met with silence, they stole equipment from the compound. In February 2008, five members of the village committee that had been set up to recover the stolen equipment were arrested, put in jail, and beaten. The local Safbois manager promised the villagers more bikes, sewing machines, sacks of salt, sugar, cigarettes, palm wine, and bottles of Johnny Walker.

Greenpeace reported several more conflicts between Safbois and local communities.

In 2012, Groupe Blattner Elwyn (GBE) bought SIFORCO from Danzer, a Swiss-German logging company. The company produced more than 25% of all timber logged in DRC, with concessions covering about 2.1 million hectares.

A 2015 Global Witness report accused SIFORCO of being one of the worst in the country. In a 2018 report about the threats to forests in the Congo Basin, Earthsight wrote that,

To give just one example, the officially-mandated Independent Observer of Forest Law Enforcement discovered that in 2013 one of SIFORCO’s concessions had cut 50% more trees than authorised – 26,000 cubic metres of illegal timber, much of it of prohibited species, worth millions of dollars.

Jonathan Blattner told Ngira that SIFORCO was put into voluntary liquidation on 29 November 2016 “and from that date has stopped all lumber activities”. But even then, the logging didn’t stop. A 2019 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency notes that SIFORCO had “sold five concessions to the Chinese company Booming Green DRC”.

In its 2018 report Earthsight wrote that,

In September 2017, [Elwyn] Blattner was reportedly arrested by DRC authorities, for unclear charges relating to the spectacular collapse of his group’s bank, BIAC, the previous year. He was later released on bail.

In 2020, David Blattner was arrested and accused of embezzling public funds. Blattner is CEO of a construction company called Societe Africaine de Construction au Congo (Safricas). The company won the contract to build flyovers in Kinshasa. In February 2021, the Kinshasa Court of Appeal sentenced Blattner to 20 years of hard labour. He also had to repay more than US$800,000 and pay the state US$1 million in damages. “it is unclear whether David actually served this sentence,” Ngari writes.

No free, prior and informed consent

In September 2014, the Isangi REDD project was certified by Verra, the Washington DC-based carbon certification company. The first credits were sold in May 2015.

But it was only in December 2019 that Daniel Blattner, by then the managing director of both Jadora and Safbois, issued a contract informing people living in the project area about the REDD project. This is a clear breach of the principle of free, prior and informed consent, which is required under DRC laws and Verra’s guidelines.

In March 2019, the Isangi REDD project set up a Facebook page, which it used (until April 2021) to announce its free, prior and informed consent process:

Litete Gelalisa Emmanuel, who lives in Yafunga, told Ngari that,

“We don’t know anything about carbon credits. We don’t understand how it works. They keep telling us that they are using satellites, and it shows we’re extracting carbon. But we don’t have any tools, we don’t have anything.”

Verra did not respond to Ngari’s questions about FPIC and the Isangi REDD project.

Buyers of Isangi REDD credits

Between May 2015 and February 2021, the Isangi REDD project sold a total of 1,391,623 carbon credits. Buyers included the consulting firm Roland Berger, the municipality of Davos, Sydney Airport, shoe company Vivobarefoot Switzerland, agri-business firm Olam, Swedish transport logistics company Scanlog, whisky maker William Grant & Sons, Finnish food delivery company Wolt Enterprises, and Swiss energy company Primeo Energie.

The project was listed on Stand for Trees, a USAID-supported website which sold Isangi REDD carbon credits for US$10 each. Stand for Trees also wrote a promotional piece about Isangi on its Medium blog. The project has now been removed from Stand for Trees’ website.

In 2022, Mongabay reported that Delta Airlines had bought carbon credits from the Isangi REDD project.

Also in 2022, Le Monde reported that Delta and Italian oil and gas company Eni were “among its largest customers”.

Both Eni and Delta Airlines have now had their names removed from Verra’s database of carbon credit sales from the Isangi REDD project.

The names of 87% of the buyers of carbon credits from the Isangi REDD project are not listed on Verra’s database.

When Ngari asked Verra about these anonymous purchases, a Verra spokesperson replied,

We do not hold a complete, up-to-date credit-by-credit transaction record. That’s not our job. We certify projects, and issue credits. After which, the project proponent can sell those credits on the open marketplace. Sometimes the project proponent wishes to display the purchases on their Verra registry page, and sometimes they do not. Again, this is not our job to track individual credits as we do not engage in market transactions.

A transparent carbon market would reveal which companies bought carbon credits from which projects. It is extremely revealing that Verra chooses not to do so.

Yafunga village

Yafunga is a village in Isangi territory, with a population of about 8,000 people. Africa Uncensored reports that they rely mostly on farming and fishing for their livelihoods. There is no road to the village. Just one clinic serves the whole village. There are two school buildings.

Yafunga is one of 30 villages in the Isangi REDD project area. When the REDD project started, Jadora promised schools, roads, and better healthcare among other things. Villagers in Yafunga told Ngari that they have seen few, if any, benefits.

In 2007, John Vidal travelled to Isangi to report for The Guardian on the Safbois logging concession. Villagers told him that their “hunting grounds are being destroyed, their access to wild food denied, there are no jobs”.

In September 2004, Safbois signed a contract with three villages to build schools, hospitals, provide jobs, and repair roads. Yafunga was one of the villages promised a school. Instead of a school, Vidal found a “makeshift shelter”.

When Ngari visited Yafunga she found that all that remains of the school was “a rundown building with a rusty, windblown roof and a collapsed wall”. This was the only school that Safbois built.

In February 2022, Jadora built seven more classrooms, “with decent roofing and floors, complete with student desks,” Ngari writes.

Vidal visited the Safbois headquarters in Kinshasa. He interviewed David Blattner, the company’s financial director, and Daniel Blattner, the managing director. Daniel Blattner was angry that Vidal had visited the Safbois logging concession without informing the company first.

“Soon everyone is shouting,” Vidal wrote.

Daniel Blattner shouted at him:

“This country has one renewable resource. Wood. Trees are renewable. We are working to achieve everything we agreed. We have invested money. We have paid workers.”

In 2019, when communities signed agreements with Jadora allowing their land to be used for the Isangi REDD project, they were told their land would be managed differently. But Litete Emmanuel, who lives in Yafunga, told Ngari that,

“We cannot do anything with the land since they came. When they came, they told us they were not exactly a company, but were just following Safbois.”

The village of Yafunga received US$300 each year from Safbois and Jadora. But the school teacher, Michel Bolonga, told Ngari that the most recent payment was seven or eight years ago. Jadora’s Celestin Bolami told Ngari that the money had been paid to to the chief of the village, to distribute to specific families.

Bolonga said that,

“Since Jadora introduced the carbon credit programme here we have not been satisfied. Honestly, we don’t understand the services they provide, how much they are exploiting, or the costs involved. We also have no idea who the buyer is. Our main concern is that they are exploiting resources but we have no clarity on what they are doing.”

Isangi REDD project cancelled

In January 2024, DRC’s Ministry for Environment and Sustainable Development cancelled eight conservation concessions, including Isangi REDD. This was part of a review of 82 of the forest concessions in the country. Ngari writes that,

The ministry’s report states that Safbois failed to follow set procedures when converting the initial logging concession into a conservation concession and consequently ordered the company to return the project land back to the state.

At some point, the Blattners transferred the Isangi REDD project to another Blattner family company called Congo Emissions Management.

Having sold 1.3 million carbon credits from the Isangi REDD project (worth at least US$7 million, assuming a price of US$5 per credit), the Blattners have moved on to another carbon project: the Tshopo Lomami REDD project.

The project is run by Daniel Blattner’s son, Brandon Blattner. It is currently listed as “under validation” on Verra’s registry. The project covers a total area of 446,080 hectares and is backed by four companies, three of which are managed by Brandon Blattner: Renewable Solutions Inc (RESO); Green Initiatives Inc (GRIN); and Biodiversity Developments Inc (BIODEV).

The project area is further subdivided into RESO I, RESO II, GRIN I, and GRIN II. Ngari points out that one possible explanation for splitting up the REDD project is to bypass DRC’s Forestry Code which limits the size of concessions to 500,000 hectares. Concessions above 300,000 hectares are approved by presidential order, and concessions above 400,000 hectares by a law passed by the National Assembly.

When Ngira asked Professor Malassi Joseph, the Climate Change Advisor at DRC’s Ministry of Environment, about the companies behind the project, Joseph said that,

“We’re not saying that we are not going to give two to three lands just because the name of the same manager comes up everywhere. The government gives concessions to the company, not the individual. Managers come and go.”

The three companies, RESO, GRIN, and BIODEV are registered at the same address in Florida. The names of David and Daniel Blattner are the only names listed on the Florida Department of State company registry as being associated with the three companies.