Cambodian logging syndicate tied to major U.S. wood flooring supply chains

This is the second part of a Mongabay series investigating Cambodia’s illicit timber trade. Read Part One.

Several Cambodian journalists helped to report this investigation, but have requested not to be named due to the sensitive nature of the story.

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia — On a rain-sodden day in September 2023, reporters entered the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone on the southwest coast of Cambodia, in the country’s largest port city. Established in 2008 through a partnership between Chinese and Cambodian private companies, the Sihanoukville SEZ hosts a range of Cambodian and Chinese ventures exporting products worldwide.

Among them is Nature Flooring (Cambodia), a Chinese-owned company established in the Sihanoukville SEZ in May 2019. Nature Flooring is just one of the many subsidiaries of China’s Nature Home Group, focused on wooden flooring and doors. The firm’s website states that the group is valued at 87.6 billion yuan (about $12 billion) and boasts several partnerships with U.S. companies.

Over the course of a year, Mongabay has collected evidence that suggests much of the plywood used to craft the products sold by Nature Flooring and other companies within the Sihanoukville SEZ may have been illegally logged from protected Cambodian rainforests.

The investigation found that U.S. consumers risk furnishing their homes with flooring products made from wood logged illegally from the Cambodian rainforest while believing the products to be sustainably sourced.

Cambodia’s forests have been devastated by logging operations that have undermined conservation efforts nationwide and exacerbated risks in a country already vulnerable to the global climate crisis.

Mongabay’s investigation began inside a small office in one of the four factories that Nature Flooring had purchased in the Sihanoukville SEZ. Here, reporters met with Jin Tian Liao, a translator for Nature Flooring’s management.

He explained that in 2019 the company acquired two plywood factories in the SEZ — ProWood (Cambodia) Flooring and Woodin Wood (formerly Paladin Lake) — to make engineered hardwood flooring products.

“Woodin produce the wooden flooring, which includes the plywood, it’s all engineered hardwood flooring,” he said. “It’s this kind of flooring you’ll find in houses across the U.S.”

According to one Cambodian timber industry insider, anyone buying wooden products through Nature Flooring in Cambodia has likely acquired contaminated products, but minimal testing is done on flooring to determine the species or origin of the wood.

“They themselves don’t know what it is that they’re selling,” the insider said, speaking anonymously due to their ongoing business operations in Cambodia. “But if the customers in the U.S. who actually want a green home powered by green energy realize they’re actually walking on a jungle that they helped to cut down, people will get upset.”

Nature Flooring Cambodia’s factory floor was abuzz with workers sorting plywood sheets that form the core layer of the company’s engineered wooden flooring products.

Thin veneers of oak and hickory, largely sourced from Vietnam and China, make up the visible surface of the products, but according to Jin, the plywood cores are sourced from a single company: Angkor Plywood.

Angkor Plywood is a Cambodian company at the helm of a notorious logging syndicate that has been labeled “an existential threat” to the country’s forests.

Jin showed Mongabay a contract between Nature Flooring and Angkor Plywood, but would not divulge how much the contract was worth.

“We buy from Angkor Plywood in Kandal province, the company provides eucalyptus and acacia, they have their own plantation in Kandal province,” he said. “They grow it, we buy it, we produce flooring and sell that to the U.S.”

Jin conceded that Nature Flooring staff had never actually visited Angkor Plywood’s plantation in Kandal province.

But doing so would have been impossible: Angkor Plywood doesn’t have a plantation in Kandal, only a factory where timber is delivered from various sources and then sold on, often for export.

Established in 2011, Angkor Plywood is headed by Chea Pov, a former logger who worked his way up through the ranks of Pheapimex, a Cambodian conglomerate owned by Choeung Sopheap, herself a powerful figure associated with timber trafficking and one of the owners of the Sihanoukville SEZ.

Pov’s business partner in Angkor Plywood, Lu Chu Chang, is a Taiwanese national who’s been involved in logging in Cambodia since the ’90s through his former company Cherndar Plywood, which at its height controlled vast swaths of Cambodian forests and illegally targeted resin trees. Chang also heads Think Biotech, a company that, on paper, is developing a 34,000-hectare (84,000-acre) “sustainable” timber plantation on the border of Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary in Kratie province. In December 2023, Think Biotech rebranded, officially changing its name to Holy Plantation according to Cambodian commerce records.

It’s this plantation from which Jin presumed Nature Flooring was purchasing acacia and eucalyptus. But in 2023, Mongabay added to the substantial body of evidence that suggests Holy Plantation (formerly Think Biotech) relies more heavily on the logging and laundering of natural forest in neighboring Prey Lang than it does processing plantation-grown timber.

At 489,662 hectares (1.2 million acres), Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary is one of Cambodia’s largest protected areas and is rich in both natural resources and biodiversity. Once considered the largest lowland rainforest in mainland Southeast Asia, Prey Lang has been badly degraded over the last decade, and despite its protected status, the sanctuary is now besieged by loggers and mining companies.

It’s also where the allegations against Holy Plantation (formerly Think Biotech) and Angkor Plywood stem from.

The central location and relatively flat topography of Prey Lang has put its forests and the Indigenous communities who depend on it in the crosshairs of commercial gold miners, iron ore miners and loggers — the latter of which have been consistently tied to Think Biotech (now Holy Plantation). Between 2001 and 2023, Prey Lang lost some 102,000 hectares (252,000 acres) of tree cover — roughly 64,500 hectares (159,400 acres) of which was primary forest — with Global Forest Watch data showing a spike in primary forest loss since Chang took over Think Biotech in December 2018.

In the years that followed, Think Biotech has been repeatedly accused of illegally logging Prey Lang’s protected forests, laundering the timber and selling it to sister company Angkor Plywood as plantation-grown wood, namely acacia and eucalyptus.

“We only know what we see when they send the deliveries, we’ve not seen the place,” Jin said, adding that, at the time, Nature Flooring didn’t have traceability procedures to guarantee the origins of the wood purchased.

This appears to be a recurring issue for the company. In August 2017, Nature Flooring Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Nature Home group, was forced to halt imports of illegally harvested taun (Pometia pinnata) wood from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands after investigations by environmental watchdog Global Witness found that much of the timber purchased by Nature Flooring Inc. and other U.S. wooden flooring companies had been harvested illegally.

Flaunting “green” credentials on its website, Nature Home claims to participate in corporate environmental and sustainability programs run by WWF and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Until as recently as 2018 it was a member of WWF’s Global Forest & Trade Network (GFTN), a program aimed at encouraging private sector actors dealing in forest products to do so responsibly, but one that has faced significant criticism.

WWF confirmed that its GFTN program had ended and that Nature Home was not part of its successor program, Forests Forward, with a WWF representative saying in an email to Mongabay that “WWF does not have any active partnership agreements with Nature Home Co. or its subsidiaries.”

The FSC certifies wooden products as environmentally sustainable, but certificates for both Nature Home’s U.S. subsidiary and Cambodian subsidiary were terminated in 2023. No reason for the termination was provided by the FSC, but neither subsidiary was listed as having an FSC-certified due diligence system in place.

“We will have a policy and procedure for internal traceability as we all know this problem is becoming more and more serious and requires a response,” Jin said. “We’ve already seen that some customers in the U.S. are asking for these documents, not all of them, but some of them want it.”

But the lack of transparency or traceability is a feature, not a bug, according to the timber industry insider who requested anonymity due to the nature of their work in Cambodia.

Over numerous interviews in late 2023 and 2024, the insider told Mongabay that “It’s definitely not acacia that’s being sent [by Angkor Plywood] — it’s jungle wood at the core of it.”

The industry insider, who demonstrated a deep understanding of the Cambodian timber industry, said Angkor Plywood is more than capable of bribery, obfuscating supply chains, and mislabeling wood products as legally logged species through their political connections, adding that these are common tactics for trading illicit products.

“Everybody knows. Angkor Plywood’s story is known by every infant in Cambodia that deals with wood, so they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re basically defrauding the U.S. and they’re hurting the Cambodian people,” the insider said.

There are minimal checks on the core of flooring products manufactured by companies in the Sihanoukville SEZ, they added, while Angkor Plywood was more than capable of mislabeling its plywood products as acacia or eucalyptus. The industry insider also alleged that Angkor Plywood was paying bribes to retain sole rights to ship timber and plywood into the SEZ’s factories and that customs officials were paid not to document trucks delivering its products to the SEZ, usually at night.

Chea Vuthy, a senior official at the Council for the Development of Cambodia, an executive government agency, who’s responsible for the management of SEZs and foreign investments in this role, told Mongabay that international buyers sourcing wood products from the Sihanoukville SEZ will only accept products made from farmed wood.

“All wood companies located inside [the] SEZ in [Sihanoukville] produce furniture and engineered flooring for U.S. and EU markets. The products must be produced from farmed wood only. They don’t accept at all any company using our natural wood from natural forest as a [raw material] for their products,” he said.

Vuthy also happens to be the brother of Angkor Plywood chairman Chea Pov. Vuthy wouldn’t answer questions about the company, its role in illegal deforestation, the allegations that Angkor Plywood was the only company licensed to sell timber and plywood into the SEZ, or how the potential for contaminated products sold abroad could impact Cambodia’s trade relations or the allegations it faces.

Vuthy previously called for more investment in the timber sector to fuel furniture exports, without disclosing that his brother runs one of Cambodia’s largest timber-processing companies.

Veteran forest activist Marcus Hardtke, who has more than two decades of experience working in Cambodia’s forests, said Angkor Plywood has risen from being a virtually unknown entity in the ’90s to becoming “the most powerful timber cartel in the country.”

“Satellite images show it, every villager knows it, every official knows it, but it continues because everyone knows who is behind that company,” he said.

Hardtke said Angkor Plywood primarily targets tall Dipterocarp species with column-like trunks that are easy to process into plywood. These species “are the bread and butter” of Angkor Plywood, he added.

These allegations have long been supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has documented abuses committed by Think Biotech (now Holy Plantation) and Angkor Plywood through its conservation project in Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary.

An unpublished 2021 report produced by Tetra Tech for USAID, obtained by Mongabay through a freedom of information request, dubbed Angkor Plywood “an existential threat to Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary.”

The report detailed “a network of forestry crime that leads back to” Angkor Plywood, with “substantial evidence of illegal logging and timber laundering” by Think Biotech, as well as corruption among provincial authorities.

It documents numerous instances between 2018 and 2021 tying Think Biotech and Angkor Plywood to illegal logging in Prey Lang, including the systematic targeting of resin trees that have been tapped sustainably for decades by the Indigenous Kuy community.

The Kuy people can’t legally own the resin trees, which are Dipterocarp species and include Dipterocarpus alatus, Dipterocarpus costatus and Shorea guiso — all of which are categorized as threatened species with declining populations on the IUCN Red List. Instead, communities have the right to tap the resin, but not to sell or fell the trees.

Despite this, accounts have been documented of communities, under intense economic pressure, collaborating with Think Biotech to sell off resin trees.

Angkor Plywood’s Pov declined to be interviewed when Mongabay reached out in June 2023, leaving the task to his business partner Chang, the Taiwanese national who also heads Think Biotech. During this interview, Chang rejected allegations of illegally cutting a logging route directly from Think Biotech’s concession into the Stung Treng province section of Prey Lang.

Chang and his business associates subsequently stopped replying to questions sent by Mongabay.

During an unaired segment of the June 2023 interview, writing in a reporter’s notepad, Chang gave the Chinese names of two companies in the Sihanoukville SEZ that Angkor Plywood supplies with plywood: 飛羽公司 and 大自然公司.

The first company that Chang claimed to sell to in the SEZ, which translates to Flying Feather, was identified as Flying Feather (Cambodia) Wood-Industry, which began operations in the Sihanoukville SEZ in October 2020.

When reporters visited Flying Feather, company director Yang Jianxiong said she had met with Chang in 2021 but deemed the plywood he offered to be low quality, too expensive, and denied having ever bought from Chang.

“We know this guy,” Yang’s assistant told Mongabay, but declined to elaborate on the relationship.

The second company was identified as Nature Flooring (Cambodia), whose staff not only confirmed that Angkor Plywood was its sole source of plywood in Cambodia, but also detailed how its products were reaching U.S. consumers through sales to other companies within the Sihanoukville SEZ.

Jin, Nature Flooring’s translator, told Mongabay that plywood purchased from Angkor Plywood is then sold on to Fine Flooring, which also runs a flooring factory in the SEZ and is a wholly owned subsidiary of AHF Products, headquartered in Mountville, Pennsylvania, and which claims to be the largest U.S. wood flooring manufacturer.

“We sell to Fine Flooring and they finish the products, then they take orders from AHF,” said Jin from Nature Flooring. “They [AHF Products] buy both the [Stone Polymer Composite flooring] and the final [engineered hardwood] flooring product from Fine Flooring.”

Export records from Panjiva, a global trade transparency monitor, show that AHF is one of Nature Flooring’s largest customers. But as the industry insider noted, tracking the sales of plywood from Angkor Plywood to Nature Flooring to other factories within the SEZ, such as Fine Flooring, is challenging because domestic sales don’t appear in trade data.

Devin Barta, director of Fine Flooring and former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Reporters were denied entry when arriving at the company’s factory in the Sihanoukville SEZ to request an interview.

AHF claims to have some 150 years of experience in the business, eight facilities across the U.S. and one in Cambodia. The company was acquired in 2018 by American Industrial Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, and then sold again to Paceline Equity Partners, another private equity firm from Texas in 2022.

In 2023, Paceline Equity Partners became a signatory to the U.N.-supported Principles for Responsible Investment, a commitment to promote environmentally and socially responsible governance, which appears to be at odds with the apparent inclusion of Angkor Plywood in AHF’s supply chain.

“AHF does not use any illegally harvested wood products,” AHF wrote in an emailed response to Mongabay’s questions in March 2024. “We only use wood veneers made from plantation-harvested eucalyptus and acacia in Cambodia and not from the sanctuaries referenced. We have a rigorous supplier vetting and compliance program to verify all wood products are legally sourced. Any inferences to the contrary are simply not true.”

The company didn’t respond to questions regarding the sourcing of plywood from Angkor Plywood.

AHF claimed it “do[es] not know of any flooring producers who would use illegally harvested veneers in the SEZ, nor are we aware of any protected species in the region used to manufacture flooring,” adding that “species other than eucalyptus and acacia would not work in the highly engineered process of wood flooring manufacturing and would cause those processes to fail.”

AHF, whose executives have previously described transparency as their “secret sauce,” would not confirm or deny whether Angkor Plywood was directly or indirectly supplying plywood or other wood products to AHF.

When sent follow-up questions by Mongabay, AHF said it had “nothing to add and no additional follow-up at this time.”

The company also declined to answer questions regarding its vetting and compliance program, why its manufacturing process would fail using other species, or how it didn’t know about Angkor Plywood’s reputation for illegal logging.

Hardtke, the forest activist, expressed disbelief that companies like Nature Flooring, Fine Flooring or AHF wouldn’t know about Angkor Plywood’s reputation or the allegations of the company’s involvement in the logging of protected forests.

“I think that is virtually impossible,” Hardtke said. “If so, they would be the only people in the Cambodian forest sector who are not aware of Angkor Plywood’s reputation.”

Angkor Plywood and Think Biotech were cited as a case study in a 2021 Forest Trends report warning that plywood and flooring were the two riskiest wood products companies could purchase from Cambodia.

But according to Hardtke, Cambodian companies frequently hide the origins of their wooden products and U.S. companies rarely conduct thorough due diligence; doing so, he said, would make doing business in Cambodia almost impossible for foreign investors.

“Angkor Plywood is sourcing timber from natural forest, meaning mostly from protected areas,” he said. “Tree plantations are still very small businesses in Cambodia, apart from rubber trees. They put whatever on transport, tax permits, export permits — getting convenient paperwork is a well-oiled business.”

Banner image: A worker handling plywood sheets at Nature Flooring’s factory in the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.