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How a small Chinese company tricked the German state | DW Investigation
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It could be the biggest climate fraud in German history. We have severe fraud here, organized crime with huge damage. A tool meant to make the oil industry cleaner provided criminals with the unique opportunity for a billion euro fraud. This is a mess. This is a takeover. This is not climate protection. DW's investigative unit teamed up with Germany's public broadcaster ZDF to investigate this fraud, which began with complex carbon credits certified in Germany and took us all the way to oil fields in China. This is Shangli Oil Field in eastern China. Documents we've acquired show that the owner supposedly installed new energy-efficient equipment that reduces the oil field's carbon emissions by more than 250,000 tons per year.
This modernization was approved as an environmental protection project in Germany. In May, our ZDF colleague in Beijing traveled to the Shangli Oil Field to find the new equipment. Mr. Cao has been working in this oil field for many years. He frequently travels to nearby oil wells. We drove to the company that supposedly installed the new equipment. The coordinates at the headquarters were also listed in the documents. And we found, well, almost nothing, just an abandoned chicken coop. This tied in with tips we had gotten from insiders within the carbon trade market in that many of the Chinese projects that were sold to German companies are nothing but a lucrative fraud.
Setting up a real project costs tens of millions, whereas faking a project just purely on paper, like out of thin air, you only need to forge a basket of new documents and you gain hundreds of millions of euros in return. Carbon credits worldwide are under scrutiny. For months, we dug into carbon saving projects in China. We trawled through satellite images, corroborated coordinates, and sifted through thousands of pages of project documents, which were submitted to the German authorities for approval under a relatively new scheme. Since 2020, oil companies operating in Germany can invest in projects that reduce carbon emissions at oil or gas fields in other countries. Like China.
In return, they obtain carbon credits which they can use to meet their obligations to reduce emissions in Germany. The Federal Environment Agency is in charge of approving the projects for Germany. The most important condition to be approved? The facilities need to be new. We want to organize new climate protection. Overall, the agency has approved 66 projects in China, organized under random letter combinations. Their total market value exceeds 2 billion euros. Many of the projects are in Xinjiang, China's remote Uyghur region, with often limited access. The agency's president, Dirk Messner, told us that none of its employees ever visited any of the projects in China.
It's standard procedure to leave the auditing to private specialized companies. We have three colleagues at the OBA who are involved in many of these projects. They can't check the technical data in detail. They can't check whether satellites' data are in detail. And this is the loophole that apparently was exploited. Weeks after our visit to the chicken coop, the auditor sent the real coordinates of the company's address, claiming it was a mix-up. But wrong coordinates were not the only irregularities we came across. We found addresses and dates that don't check out. Take file number BZIA. This is a recent photo a source gave us.
The station is supposed to save more than 120,000 tons of carbon emissions per year. It collects gas that would otherwise be released during the oil extraction. The gas is then liquefied and loaded onto trucks for further use. The application lists the project's start date as September 2020. But satellite images from 2019 show that the plant was already there. The four LNG tanks were clearly visible. Truck tracks at the pickup point and the security flare suggest that the plant was already operational more than one year before the application was filed. So an existing installation in China was likely submitted as a new climate project to the German authorities.
We went to Zurich to meet one of the world's leading experts on international climate policies and carbon trade. We showed Axel Michaelowe the photos and documents to understand. Were there any circumstances under which such a project could have been eligible to be approved as an environmental project in Germany? A different project, the same pattern. A plant in Xinjiang was allegedly built in 2020 and had in fact been there since 2014, as the information board at the entrance shows. Over the following months, we identified 16 such allegedly fraudulent projects in China. Almost all seem to have been submitted by different Chinese companies.
Are Germany's carbon schemes and their potential loopholes common knowledge across China? Could so many different companies be using the same trick? Our colleague from ZDF's Beijing bureau went to visit some of the companies mentioned in the documents. At the first address, we were supposed to find a power distribution company, which supposedly submitted two projects. Our search led us to the fifth floor. The next company. No. 3 The first company was ZDF. The second company was ZDF. The third company was ZDF. No. 3 Projects that are not eligible, companies that seemingly don't exist. Things get more and more mysterious. Then the plot thickens. The German Environment Agency received a letter from a Chinese company.
We have a copy. It claims that another company called Beijing Carbon New Energy Technology had filed five projects in its name, without its knowledge, let alone consent. Moreover, it states Beijing Carbon had erroneously altered data. There was a high probability that the documents were forged. The company asked German authorities to investigate. For me, it was a game changer. When it was first stated, the attack on identity theft, so to speak, in the room, that was the first clear indication for me that something was going completely wrong. So it took this tip-off from China for the German authorities to launch a full-scale investigation.
They referred the case to the prosecution, who, as of now, is only looking into the German side. Not the Chinese company behind the whole scheme. Chinese company Records helped us investigate Beijing Carbon. It was founded in 2011 by a former official in the energy sector. Together with her son and several others, they set up an opaque network of companies and sub-companies. We find references to Beijing Carbon, their employees or addresses in the documents of at least 28 projects. Our colleague tried to visit the company in Beijing. The manager, she was told, was unavailable. Then they hung up. As we tried to find out more about Beijing Carbon, the company seemed to get nervous.
Information we obtained suggests the company asked its Chinese business partners not to talk to the press. Anti-China media are using shady methods to smear all Chinese projects, was allegedly said in these conversations. Beijing Carbon Beijing Carbon had an offer that met a growing demand in Germany. Oil companies were under pressure to reduce their carbon footprint. And here was an easy way to go about it. Only one of the buyers in Germany was ready to tell us on camera how the deal worked. Stefan Schreiber is a board member of Verbio. The company produces biofuels and trades carbon credits. A business partner introduced him to the Chinese projects.
They decided to invest in credits worth an estimated worth of 25 million euros. The contract was a sufficient standard that we have and that we know. So there was no reason for us to doubt it. It was a ready-to-go, all-inclusive package with all the necessary paperwork. The Chinese company commissioned the auditors and filed for approval. Schreiber had to do nothing except transfer the money. It was a smooth process. Otherwise, it would not have been possible in this form, in this profession. It's a suspicion many in the industry share. Some sources explicitly pointed us to the roles of the auditors. Remember, the auditing is not done by the authorities, but by private companies.
One insider with first-hand knowledge of the workings of the industry agreed to talk to us. For fear of repercussions from what he says is an extremely tight-knit community, he did not want to show his face. 70% of the Chinese projects come from one project proponent. And on the other side, there's only two auditing companies that will always go and validate and verify the project. And you know, that's where the chemistry happens. We didn't find any direct evidence of collusion between Beijing Carbon and the German auditing companies. But many inconsistencies in the auditing reports made us wonder whether there may have been foul play. Take project EQBT, another one of Beijing Carbon's projects.
According to the documents, the site was inspected by two auditing companies, altogether seven times. In their reports, the companies confirmed that the installation consisted of six big storage tanks for liquefied gas and 12 generators. But satellite images and photos we obtained only ever show four tanks and four generators. How could the auditors possibly miss that? So the auditors didn't do their job? Not at all, or even worse, the auditing company is suspended. The auditors in this case were two companies with an excellent reputation in the industry. Müller BBM Cert is specialized in environmental certification. And the second company, Veraco SCE, located in this picturesque village in southern Germany, has an equally good reputation.
Their executive chairman is known as one of the leading experts on carbon certification. Forty-eight of the 66 Chinese projects were audited by at least one of the two companies. If the auditors were to be fired, then that's a super job. Müller BBM Cert and Veraco SCE refused several requests for an on-camera interview, but replied in writing. We see no reason to doubt our auditing work, nor the work of our auditors. We are convinced that no criminal offense has been committed by the employees of our company. The prosecutor's office in Berlin recently searched the premises of both those companies, along with a third one which audited a few other allegedly fraudulent projects.
We are investigating a group of companies that are currently facing 17 charges, which are either by business leaders or by employees of three auditing companies. Politicians have also reacted. Members of parliament twice summoned the president of the Environmental Agency for questioning. The agency has now placed 45 projects under suspicion. They are worth 1 billion euros, according to estimates. The projects could have saved the amount of carbon a megacity like Lagos emits in one year. The agency says it is working to rescind as many of the credits as possible. And the program is now closed to new applications. Too little, too late, say many in the industry.
Their recent protest outside of the parliament was joined by opposition politicians. If we take international climate protection seriously, it can only work if we have more integrity and control systems. It obviously didn't work here. The full damage has yet to emerge. One thing, however, is already abundantly clear. It didn't take a lot to defraud a system that was supposed to make a dirty industry a little cleaner. With the right paperwork and the right people in the right places in the right places in the right places, one Chinese company was able to make hundreds of millions of euros out of thin air. .
S K R Y B O T
Skrybot. 2023, Transkrypcje video z YouTube
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