Sanctioned Wildlife Trafficking Group Tied to Logistics Companies in Southeast Asia
Sanctioned Wildlife Trafficking Group Tied to Logistics Companies in
Southeast Asia
Kelsey Hamilton and Robert Kim, Kharon
November 15, 2022
See link
https://brief.kharon.com/updates/sanctioned-wildlife-trafficking-group-tied-to-logistics-companies-in-southeast-asia/
for photo.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control
(OFAC) has imposed sanctions against a network involved in wildlife
trafficking. The Malaysia-based Teo Boon Ching trafficking group relied on
an international network of companies to import the illicit wildlife
products from Africa and transport them throughout Asia.
On October 7, OFAC used its authority to sanction transnational criminal
organizations (TCOs) to designate the wildlife trafficking group, along
with its leader and a company that he controlled. Teo Boon Ching and his
companies transported rhinoceros horns and other wildlife products from
Africa using routes through Malaysia and Laos, ultimately shipping them to
consumers in Vietnam and China, according to OFAC. The designation
accompanied Teo’s arrest in Thailand and extradition to the U.S. to face
criminal charges of wildlife trafficking and money laundering.
Teo provided detailed instructions to shippers in Africa to buy rather than
rent shipping containers and to pack other goods alongside the illicit
wildlife products, according to a report by the Environmental Investigation
Agency (EIA), a U.K.-based nonprofit. After containers cleared customs in
Pasir Gudong, a port city in the Malaysian state of Johor located at the
southern tip of the Malay Peninsula near the Malaysia-Singapore border, Teo
moved them to his warehouse for repacking and onward transportation to
their buyers.
Sunrise Greenland Sdn. Bhd., is a timber trading company majority owned by
Teo, according to Malaysian corporate records. Sunrise Greenland shares an
office suite with Metaldeck Corporation in a small building in Johor’s
capital city Johor Bahru. The co-owners of Metaldeck manage other logistics
companies that provide cross-border truck transportation from Singapore to
China through Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. While the routes and
locations that these businesses serve follow Teo’s wildlife trafficking
patterns, there is no evidence that Teo used them to facilitate the
shipment of his products.
The use of a common address by Sunrise Greenland and Metaldeck demonstrates
one of the key indicators mentioned by Treasury’s Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to file suspicious activity reports (SARs) in
its first notice on environmental crimes in 2021. FinCEN requested that SAR
filers provide any available details about how illicit products were
solicited, acquired, stored, transported, financed, and paid for, such as
names, identifiers, and contact information, including Internet Protocol
(IP) and email addresses and phone numbers.