Agent Green and BMF launch the “IKEA: Putredă Din Rădăcini” series

Bucharest, 28 October 2026 – Agent Green and Bruno Manser Fonds (BMF) are today launching the first episode of the new investigative series “IKEA: Putredă Din Rădăcini” (“IKEA: Rotten From the Roots”), produced on the basis of an investigation carried out in the forests owned by Ingka Investments and in the IKEA supply chain in Romania.

Slatina Valley, Ceahlău Massif

The first case takes us to the Slatina Valley in the Ceahlău Massif, Neamț County, at an altitude of 840–1,140 metres, in one of the most spectacular and still naturally rich landscapes in Romania.

Here, in U.P. XXXI Ceahlău-Dreptu, Ingka Investments owns a forest area of 3,388.1 hectares. Not even one hectare falls into the T1 strict protection category. Everything can be subject to interventions, and 84.76% is classed under intensive timber production. The Slatina area documented by Agent Green overlaps entirely with the Natura 2000 site ROSPA0129 “Masivul Ceahlău”.

In the investigated plot, the mixed beech and conifer forest has an average age of 186 years, with remarkable specimens of centuries-old trees. The harvesting permit analysed (actul de punere în valoare) provides for the extraction of 3,060.52 m³ of timber from this plot alone.

The documented problems

The field investigation, the drone footage and the analysis of the documents have revealed an accumulation of serious problems:

• Felling on a slope where the chosen silvicultural treatment is not permitted: the forest management plan indicates a slope of 28°, while the technical norm sets a maximum threshold of 25% for this type of intervention.
• Felling more intense than the treatment declared in the paperwork: the canopy was opened far beyond what a light transformation intervention towards selection forest would look like, leaving the soil, the stability of the forest and natural regeneration vulnerable.
• Biodiversity trees removed: old, large-diameter trees with cavities, nests and internal rot were felled, although the management plan of the protected area requires habitat trees to be retained.
• Slatina Stream turned into a haulage route: machinery used the permanent streambed for access and to bring out the timber, pushing gravel and soil into the water, narrowing and locally diverting the watercourse. The report considers the practice contrary to forestry, environmental and water protection legislation.
• Soil and forest destroyed by logging: a dense network of tractor tracks produced erosion and destabilised embankments, dozens of trees not meant for felling were broken or knocked down, and the documented primary platform exceeds the legal limit of 500 m².
• Traceability problems: at least three transport notices had photographs from which the load could not be properly identified.

Complaints and official checks

Before publishing these findings, Agent Green took the step it considers essential in an investigation of this kind: it notified the competent authorities and asked for their official verification on the ground. Our investigators returned to the site, attended the inspections and made the images, documents and evidence they had gathered available to the institutions. The result is that today we are not publishing merely a collection of accusations: some of the irregularities we flagged have already been officially confirmed and sanctioned, including by fining the owner Ingka Investments Forest Assets SRL, sanctions by the Forest Guard, felling of trees without right, the confiscation of a truck, the criminal case and the sanctioning of another timber transport. Agent Green explicitly presents the findings that the authorities have not yet confirmed or refuted as documented suspicions and continues to request their verification.

The confiscated truck and the criminal case

So the investigation did not stop at photographs. In the same valley, the Agent Green team followed a truck for which the system showed no accompanying notice. The logs had been loaded from platforms on both sides of the road, administered by Romsilva and IKEA/Ingka. After hours of checks and measurements that continued late into the night, the load exceeded eight cubic metres. The footage documents the police order to confiscate the truck and the opening of a criminal case.

A few days later, the investigators identified a new suspicious transport. This time the timber came from exactly the IKEA/Ingka logging operation monitored by Agent Green, and the transport was carried out by SC Steflucil SRL, the holder of the logging permit. The police imposed a fine of 1,000 lei for non-compliant photographs entered into the traceability system.

Inspections and sanctions

Following Agent Green’s complaints, institutional inspections also followed. The National Environmental Guard fined Ingka Investments Forest Assets SRL 50,000 lei, after finding that the owner had not complied with the obligation under the environmental approval to revise the forest management plan by the set deadline. The Forest Guard separately imposed two sanctions totalling 3,000 lei and identified a beech tree illegally felled and stolen, whose value was calculated at 3,158.3 lei.

The 50,000 lei fine was not imposed for all the degradation documented by Agent Green in the field, but for failure to comply with the obligation to revise the forest management plan. The organisation explicitly separates its own findings and the suspicions that require technical verification from the violations already officially confirmed and sanctioned by the authorities.

“Ceahlău is not a timber depot with a beautiful landscape around it. We are talking about a forest with trees almost two centuries old, in a protected area, managed by a company that talks obsessively about sustainability. When we end up staying on the trail of trucks until night so that the authorities can measure the timber, and then have to stay on the authorities’ trail too so that they inspect the forest, the problem is no longer one of image. It is a systemic one,” says Gabriel Păun, founder of Agent Green.

What comes next

The Slatina/Ceahlău episode opens the film series of the new Agent Green – Bruno Manser Fonds investigation. New cases will be published gradually, and the full report “IKEA: Putredă din rădăcini – Avertismente ignorate. Amenzi aplicate. Contracte continuate.” (“IKEA: Rotten From the Roots – Warnings Ignored. Fines Imposed. Contracts Continued.”) will appear at the end of the series and will bring together the case studies, the documents, the responses from the authorities that we continue to receive, and the conclusions of the investigation.

Until then, we are publishing forest by forest.

Press contact

Eng. Dan Cătălin Turiga, Agent Green Investigator, 0728273782, dan-catalin.turiga@agentgreen.org

Ines Gavriluț, Bruno Manser Fonds, ines.gavrilut@bmf.ch