Who Guards the Forests From the Guards? Charges Against Four From "National Forests", and the Official Hammer Ended Up on Undocumented Wood

At the state forestry company "National Forests" there is a tool that decides whether a log is legal or not - the official hammer used to stamp the timber. In recent days its marks turned up in the wrong place: on firewood in a truck, with people who had no paperwork whatsoever for the load.

On October 7, near the village of Teovo in Čaška, police stopped a "MAN" truck with Veles plates loaded with firewood. Some of the wood was unstamped, some stamped. The two men transporting it had no documents, and the stamped logs, according to police, had been marked with an official hammer given to them by a 57-year-old employee of the "Babuna" branch in Veles. The three were detained, the wood was seized, and charges are still to follow.

Guards who didn't guard

In Negotino, meanwhile, the local police filed a criminal complaint against four employees of the Demir Kapija branch, guards at the company's yard, for "negligent performance of duty". Between July 31 and August 3, while they were on duty, someone removed and took away an aluminium side panel from a truck - a vehicle that was itself the subject of a criminal case and had been left at the yard precisely to be guarded. The damage is 25,000 denars.

The sum isn't large, but the message is bigger: a vehicle left in custody as part of a criminal case couldn't be kept safe even in the yard of a state company with paid guards.

400 cubic metres and an "octopus"

The biggest case is only now being unravelled. On the orders of the Basic Public Prosecutor's Office, together with the Interior Ministry and the Forest Police, around 400 cubic metres of wood is being seized from a Skopje firm that trades in firewood, with an estimated market value of around two million denars, or over 30,000 euros. The operation was announced by the deputy director of "National Forests", Kire Mihailov, who says it followed a ten-day intensive investigation.

Mihailov talks about a well-organised group that illegally transported and sold wood for a long time, with "tentacles" stretching from Skopska Crna Gora and Kitka to the mountains near Gostivar and Veles. More serious is his other suspicion: that abuse on such a scale could hardly happen without support from people inside institutions, including the company itself. "Nobody is untouchable," he says.

So far there's no official information on whether anyone has been detained over the 400 cubic metres. But when the company's own deputy director suspects his own ranks, the question becomes unavoidable: who guards the forests from those paid to guard them?