The Floryl Plantation
Fazenda Jatobà – Correntina – Bahia
WHAT IS THE FLORYL PLANTATION?
Floryl, or Fazenda Jatobà, is a 92,000-hectare agricultural estate in Brazil. It is owned, and operated, by the Teachers Group.
The TG bought this valuable commercial property secretly from Shell oil in 1994 for $12m, making payments through a trail of nominee companies, offshore accounts and fake charities (see below). These transactions, clearly designed to disguise the money trail, came to light during the police investigation and trial of 2001-6.
Much of the story is explained in the Danish police report of 2001.
The central police allegation is that the Teachers Group/Tvind used money meant for charitable work to buy Floryl, diverting it from a trust called The Humanitarian Fund and other charity sources.
Floryl is a large and profitable commercial fruit and forestry plantation, producing bananas, sugarcane, rice, citrus fruit, soya, eucalyptus and pine trees for sale and export (often through other Teachers Group subsidiary companies). The Teachers Group has claimed that Floryl is a nature reserve and an environmental project, but these claims are challenged.
There vare now indications that the Teachers Group is planning to open a ‘school’ or ‘project’ at Floryl to attract gap year students. There is no clear evidence of any humanitarian aid or environmental programme at Floryl: we believe students sent to Floryl would likely become convenient labour.
A FARM THE SIZE OF NEW YORK CITY
Floryl is a huge commercial plantation of at least 92,000 hectares – around 350 square miles. This is around the same size as the City of New York, the city of Berlin, or the UK nature reserve of Dartmoor.
According to recent information, Floryl is planted with 36,000 hectares of eucalyptus and pine trees, and there also are bananas, sugarcane, rice, citrus fruit and soya. It employs 600 farm workers.
Floryl’s products are sold in Europe, the United States, China and Brazil. The wood is exported through a Tvind-controlled company, McCorry and Co, and is used to make furniture and fence posts. You can read about the trade with Portugal here. Floryl also likely supplies wood to the Tvind enterprise in Shanghai, Trayton and Co.
Floryl is in Bahia province, near Correntina, about 500 km north of Brasilia. It is not in the Amazon rainforest.
Floryl is also known as Fazenda Jatobà and sometimes referred to as ‘Fazenda Floryl’ or ‘Floryl Florestadora’ – all names it has been associated with since 1994.
COMMERCIAL FARM OR NATURE RESERVE?
Is Floryl a business or a nature reserve? The Teachers Group/Tvind has claimed Floryl is ‘a unique nature protection project’, and imply that this is a justification for spending money collected for charity on it. The Danish police, however, declared in 2001 it was nothing more than a commercial farm.
The Teachers Group say Floryl is a nature reserve, with 30,000 hectares of ‘biological reserves’ and claim it is equipped with a carbon-neutral, ‘biomass’ power station. “This is one of the few projects in Brazil, which to such a degree combines forestry of this magnitude, with preservation of natural areas and wildlife, and production of CO2 neutral energy….” [Source: Floryl brochure]
Danish police say the ‘biomass’ power station was never an environmental project and the farm is just a business: “Floryl Florestadora YPE S.A. is a commercial enterprise, controlled by the defendants, where the profits accrue to the [Teachers Group's] treasury…..” 2001 Danish Police report
FLORYL AND GAIA
The Teachers Group raises even more money for the Floryl estate through its so-called ‘Gaia Movement’ clothes boxes, mostly in the USA. The the Gaia-movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action based in Chicago, collects and sells old clothes for unspecified ‘environmental projects’.
Floryl decsribes Gaia is its ‘partner in environmental preservation and development’. We can show that the Gaia Movement Trust is a Teachers Group/Tvind subsidiary, fully controlled by the Teachers Group, which does not declare its association with the commercial Floryl farm.
‘AID PROJECTS’, or COMMERCE?
We understand that Humana People-to-People has recently begun recruiting ‘development instructors’ at Floryl, with the implication that the plantation is part of a supposed ‘humanitarian’ programme.
There is no evidence that Floryl is an ‘aid project’.
In fact, according to local people and journalists, the plantation is the very opposite of a humanitarian project, where migrant workers are allegedly severely exploited, denied union representation or health insurance, paid low wages, and often exposed to pesticides.
The Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, reporting in 1996 the Teachers Group’s purchase of Floryl, commented: “No messing around with giving the land workers better housing, health care or education.”
Father Moacir, a priest in the local town, Posse, told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in 2000: “There is not a trace of humanity at Floryl. The Danes at Floryl suck their workers dry. They are a disgrace as employers. They don’t deal in humanity, but in the worst kind of capitalism.”
HOW WAS FLORYL BOUGHT AND PAID FOR?
Danish police alleged that between the late 1980s and 1996 the Teachers Group used “front men and companies” to secretly move money, including cash given for aid work to the charities UFF/Humana and donations to the Humanitarian Fund.
First, offshore company Tropical Farming Ltd (registered in Grand Cayman) opened negotiations with Shell. Other Tvind offshore companies (The Farmers Trust; Hobhouse Ltd; Fairbank, Cooper, Lyle…) then bought the Brazilian operating company Floryl Florestadora Ype SA.
Finally, money to complete the sale was transferred from other parts of the cash-rich Tvind economy, ‘the Teachers Group treasury’ and hidden companies or supposed charities in various countries.
From Humana/UFF and other Tvind enterprises, millions of dollars were passed to Guernsey-registered Tvind company Bahia Farming Ltd, which still owns Floryl today.
Millions of dollars were also allegedly moved as ‘charitable’ grants to a French-registered supposed ‘green charity’, La Societe Verte (also called L’Energie Eternelle), with an address in the Champs Elysee, Paris, before being transferred on to Floryl. According to police, the French charity was bogus – not a genuine charity, but a Tvind-controlled money laundering operation.
The police allegations in full
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PURCHASE
Almost every senior Teachers Group member played a role
The four key ‘decision-makers’
Amdi Petersen, Kirsten Larsen, Ruth Sejerøe-Olsen, Marlene Gunst.
Four key members of Tvind’s so-called ‘economic directorate’ who, police said in 2001, were ‘in reality behind the purchase.’ They authorised the spending and told others how to move money to achieve it. Petersen, Larsen and Gunst are charged with fraud and currently on the run from police.
Lars Jensen
The manager at Floresta Jatoba (Brasil) Ltda is Danish Teachers Group member Lars Jensen. In 1992, he was simultaneously a founder of The Humanitarian Fund and an executive committee member of La Societe Verte, alleged by police to be a front company. That year, he signed a request from La Societe Verte for a grant of $2.5 m from the Fund. Mentioned in the 2001 Danish Police Report.
Kim Bonde Andersen
In 1992 he ran the Tvind company Tropical Farming, which initiated negotiations with Shell to buy the Floryl ranch. In the mid 2000s he was running a Teachers Group logging company in Siberia, Taiga Timber, closed down by the Rissian police. Now likely to be in Zimbabwe or Central America.
Sten Byrner
Member of Tvind’s economic directorate. In 1992 he was said to be jointly responsible for arranging the purchase of Floryl Florestadora YPE S.A. with Kim Bonde Andersen. Charged with fraud and currently on the run from police.
Poul Jørgensen
Senior Teachers Group member and adviser. In 1992, he was a lawyer acting for the Humanitarian Fund. Police say he ‘wrote letters to himself’ applying for grants for Floryl. Recently convicted of fraud in Denmark and sentenced to prison term.
Bodil Ross Sørensen
Member of Tvind’s economic directorate. The chairperson of the Humanitarian Fund in 1992. She approved the $2.5m grant to La Societe Verte.
Kirsten Fuglsbjerg / Christie Pipps.
Member of Tvind’s economic directorate. On 8th August 1994, she was the main signatory of the deal to buy Floryl from Shell. Charged with fraud and currently on the run from Danish police.
Tove Birkøe. The Teachers Group manager of Floryl Florestadora YPE S.A
WHO RUNS FLORYL TODAY?
The key director of Floresta Jatoba (Brasil) Ltda is Birgitte Krohn.
Krohn is a hard-core member of the Tvind Teachers Group, and has played a part in many Tvind offshore companies, secret trusts and financial enterprises. She frequently earns a mention in the 2001 Danish Police report.
In the 1990s, Krohn was a board member of IFAS, the so-called ‘Institute for Reasearch and Applied Science’. According to Danish police, this was not a research body at all, but a Tvind financial front created to launder money into the ‘Teachers Group Treasury’. She was also a director of Kirchheiner Bros, one of the main Teachers Group ‘money pots’, based in the Channel Isles.
She escaped prosecution in the 2003-2006 Danish trial, but was one of eight Teachers Group leaders separately charged with money laundering in Belgium in 2002, although charges were dropped.
Krohn is today a director of Jersey-registered Fairbank, Cooper, Lyle (FCL), the Tvind offshore company that owns the Teachers Groups’s plantations. She is also one of the TG members behind TG Pacifico, the massive new $10 million Tvind ‘headquarters building’ at San Juan de las Pulgas, in Mexico.
CURRENT OWNERSHIP OF FLORYL
The Floryl plantation is today ultimately owned by a Jersey-registered Tvind company, Fairbank, Cooper, Lyle (FCL). This is a major Tvind offshore company and agribusiness that owns most of the Teachers Groups’s plantations. The company structure:
Fairbank, Cooper Lyle
(Registered in Jersey)
I
Bahia Farming Ltd
(Registered in Guernsey)
I
Floresta Jatoba (Brasil) Ltda
(Brazilian operator)
I
Floresta Rio Veredao Ltda
Floryl Florestadora Ype SA
(Local operating companies)
THE STORY OF RIMA INDUSTRIAL S/A
Rima Industrial S/A, a Brazilian manufacturing company, has taken the Teachers Group to the Brazilian High Court in a dispute over $6 million of timber bought from Floryl which they say they never received.
Rima executives met Birgitte Krohn and Bolette Gunst (left) to discuss the wood deal. However in late 2005, a company spokesman contacted us. He wrote: ‘We would like to receive as much as possible information about the dirty business of Tvind , because we paid them US $ 6 million for wood from the Floryl project and they simply decided not to deliver the wood.”
Rima executives travelled to Europe to meet Danish police and also contacted Interpol. The company made a complaint in the Brazilian courts and took the case to the Brazilian High Court. We do not know the outcome of the case.
One Rima official told us they had heard the money was transferred out of Brazil to Belize where it was ‘needed’. Krohn and Gunst also showed them pictures of the ‘resort’ under construction in Mexico. Both Krohn and Gunst are involved with the Teacher Group’s $10 million new development, TG Pacifico, at San Juan de las Pulgas.
PRESS REPORTS
Ekstra Bladet, Denmark (22nd September 1996): Tvind shops for new plantations. By Kurt Simonsen. A detailed account of Tvind’s ‘buying spree’ of land in Ecuador, Belize and Brazil and the conditions for workers it employs.
Dagens Nyheter, Sweden (10th June 2000): What is UFF hiding on its plantation in Brazil? By Bengt Lindström. “Profit seems to have replaced humanity as the aid organisation’s driving force.”
Berlingske Tidende, Denmark (June 29th, 2001) Stolen document reveals Tvind-fund. A document indicating Tvind’s ownership of the Jatoba plantation and revealing its true purpose – logging – was stolen from court files by one of the defendants in the Danish fraud court case against Tvind.
VEJA, Brazil (11 de julho de 2001) Uma fazenda misteriosa. Madeireira bancada por entidade filantrópica dinamarquesa agride leis brasileiras na Bahia Flávia Varella (in Portuguese)
Last revised: 31st July 2009
