License to Clear: The Dark Side of Permitting in West Papua
170
Methodological notes Group and ownership attributions There is no publicly available database containing full details of Indonesia’s plantation concessions and the groups that control them. Many concessions do belong to formally established, stock-listed companies with conventional parent-subsidiary structures that list their subsidiaries and/or estates more or less comprehensively on their websites or in their annual reports – sources on which Greenpeace has based its characterisation of these as groups, supplemented by information taken from permit documents and elsewhere. However, other concessions have much less straightforward ownership and control, belonging to complex networks of companies owned by individuals or families whose links are not (or only in part) publicly acknowledged. In some cases a well-known, high-profile company may have a cluster of clandestinely linked ‘shadow companies’ in addition to its acknowledged plantation subsidiaries; in others there is no single ultimate parent company and the group consists largely of privately held companies, not listed on any stock exchange. Different family members may be the ultimate shareholders in different companies, or parts of the group may be held offshore, rendering the ultimate owner unknowable. In other cases named legal shareholders may be nominees, where arrangements exist with other beneficial owners that have not been publicly disclosed. It is necessary to take a broad view of what constitutes a group, going beyond straightforward ownership links to include other forms of control (financial, managerial, operational or other). This must be done to get around these ways in which unscrupulous owners obscure their ownership of plantation operations engaged in forest destruction, which they may do in order to avoid compromising the market access of their publicly acknowledged subsidiaries.
