Forest Guard complicit in illegal activities in Rodna / Plunder in the Rodna Mountains National Park #6

Plunder in the Rodna Mountains National Park #6

Bucharest, 18 March 2024 – Today Agent Green publishes the sixth episode of the investigation series “Plunder in the Rodna Mountains National Park” exposing how the Forest Guard stops its inspection without justification in forests managed by the Telciu forest district.

The inspection began following Agent Green’s report of multiple illegal activities, including felling living trees of high economic value on the pretext that they were dead. Meanwhile, dead trees that should have been subject to salvage logging were not marked for felling. The report also covered the web of illegal forest roads, trees marked without inventory numbers, and work with heavy machinery in bad weather on waterlogged soil.

The inspection began at the forest district office, where Ioan Rus, the Forest Guard inspector, complains that too many issues have been reported and that he would need to move to the area for a few years. He overlooks all the reported issues and, regarding additional living trees felled during salvage logging, says that “nobody is 100% a virgin”. He suggests that “If hundreds are missing, it’s a problem, but 1–2 stolen trees are OK. We have to judge things in context. Nobody is perfect. And those rules about ecological restoration after logging were drawn up by some gentlemen in an office. I’m a hunter and I’ve seen deer using forest roads.”

After many hours at the forest district office, they only set off into the forest at 11, but not before the Guard inspector buys lottery tickets. Engineer Pupeză Luca, head of the Telciu forest district, banned Agent Green from entering the forest, but the organization’s investigators followed them 50 metres behind. Engineer Chitul Traian, responsible for the forest estate, told the investigators that he would report them to the police. They continued following them and saw the Forest Guard inspector walking with his hands in his pockets, taking no photographs and carrying no equipment to gather evidence of the reported illegal activities. He chose to stop the inspection immediately after starting it and to spend the rest of the day at the Telciu mayor’s party.

“The six episodes about the plunder in Rodna that we have published so far indicate an organized crime structure involving the Forest Guard, the police, forest districts, the mayor’s office and logging companies. We will inform the environment minister and public prosecutors,” announced Gabriel Păun, president of Agent Green.

In the next episodes we will present the environment ministry’s response and a major beneficiary of timber abusively harvested in the Rodna Mountains.

Press contact:
Dan-Cătălin TURIGA, Agent Green forestry engineer, +40 728 273 782, dan-catalin.turiga@agentgreen.org