Reporter: Peter George: Let's be blunt about this - the Solomon Islands are being plundered. It involves voracious Asian logging companies who care nothing about the jungles.
It involves politicians more interested in how much money they can make than they are in their own people. And it involves a scandal that reaches right up to the prime minister's office.
And the victims are of course the islanders themselves only some of them are at last beginning to realise that they have sold their birth rights for a pittance.
Tarcisius: You drive a taxi, you get to meet a lot of people. You meet all sorts of people, you meet prostitutes you meet ordinary people you meet Government officers, Government ministers and you get the kind of information you won't be able to get doing other things.
At night in the capital, Honiara, Tarcisius Tara drives a taxi. It's a front. It helps him dig into the corruption that logging has brought to the Solomons.
Tarcisius: Oh, I try and find out what Government ministers go to casinos, who are they hanging around with, how much money they spend at casinos ...
Tarcisius believes they come with wads of cash, paid by logging companies for timber concessions and tax breaks. When they leave, they often do so without even the price of a taxi fare.
Tarcisius: Well, I've got people there who keep record of how much money ministers spend, how much money they lost in casinos and it's quite substantial. They’ve got to be receiving money from elsewhere.
Tarcisius is not entirely alone in his pursuit. Duran Angiki also believes you have to fight the good fight and as a newspaperman, he first blew the whistle about Government ministers on the take.
Together, Tarcisius and Duran are compiling an extensive file of leaked Government and company documents that reveal how loggers routinely obtain favourable treatment by paying off ministers.
Duran Angiki, journalist: Then he told me those monies were paid out to ministers, and he named those ministers actually ...
Peter George: Totalling how much money in the end?
Duran: Totalling seven million dollars.
They also have documentation that at the least seem to reveal an extraordinary conflict of interest for the Prime Minister, Solomon Mamaloni.
Duran: Somma is the company owned by the Prime Minister.
Peter George: Solomon Mamaloni?
Duran: Yes, it's a logging company. The director of the company is the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands. The information here is the kind of information the public should know.
The betrayal starts in the pristine rainforests of 960 Solomon Islands ripe for the plucking.
Worldwide prices for hardwoods have soared, the Government desperately needs the money and tribal owners are easily conned into selling concessions for a song.
The loggers arrive with promises of wealth unimagined - and most islanders were delighted. An exception was Mary Bea.
Mary Bea, islander: People have become greedy, selfish and ah the love for money is greater than the love for each other.
Most of the islanders are ignorant and just a few educated people, greedy people invited the company to come in to Rendova Island and because they brainwashed the ignorant ones and the ignorant ones believed in them. But when the money is distributed it was unfairly distributed and that's where the ignorant people started to learn but then it's too late, the land has been logged and there is nothing for them left.
The loggers are supposed to pay 15 % of the value of each tree to the islanders and to build schools, churches, health clinics, roads and bridges.
In almost every respect the villagers have been deceived.
After four years and millions of dollars worth of exported logs, the clinic, for instance remains the ramshackle affair it always was, manned only by Reggie, the nursing aid.
Reggie, Nursing Aid: It makes me worry too much because of our children, because they won't have anything to benefit from in the future.
Mary's neighbours, once so enthusiastic, are as poor as ever and wonder what's happened to all the money.
Reggie: When you look at our village, you won't see any good developments - schools, churches and other community developments. We don't get any benefits at all. Just look at our houses.
Mary: Oh, the company give a lot of promises but these promises never happen and I don't know what time the promises will happen. And these are just false promises.
The freighter May Sunrise arrives to load the felled timber of Rendova Island. Last year according to documents viewed by Foreign Correspondent the Kalena Timber Company shipped about 7 and a half million dollars worth of logs from Rendova.
But the Malaysian company, like others loggers, is suspected of greatly under reporting the value of its logs to save on taxes. Yet about a million dollars should still have been paid to the local landowners. But the villagers can't tell us where the money has gone - and the company won't speak to us.
Timber Industry spokesman, Erich Kes, in Honiara tries to explain.
ERICH KES, Timber Industry: They are not generally speaking, just loggers companies, they are not very keen to come out into the open and say what it's all about. Landowners today have certainly ways and means to access law and access legal channels and many of the landowners to that, definitely, if the landowners don't do that, I would say this is their own decision. but it is certainly not overall a policy - and it is not happening all the time as you depicted - that landowners are taken in or basically cheated by the company.
But cheating there is at all levels. Timothy Zamma is a man grown rich after villagers chose him to represent them with the loggers. Ask him what's happened to the money and he finds plenty of spurious explanations.
Timothy Zamma, Village representative to Logging Company: They're trying to do something with the money they receive but during this time it's very very hard, a bit difficult to do.
Peter George: Why should it be difficult to spend the money?
Zamma: Because of very high inflation at this time.
Increasingly resentful and suspicious, the two thousand villagers, including Mary Bea have seen Zamma gain both power and wealth from his dealings with the Kalena company.
Peter George: Did you or your family receive a house or have you bought a house with the money that you have made from the company?
Zamma: Yes, I already build my house because when you get money you have to spend it wisely.
Peter George: What I'm wondering is why it is that someone like yourself can get enough money from the company to buy a house but these people here have nothing at all?
Zamma: It’s different - we get 15% royalty .. and if you deal with the company during negotiation, a consultant job, they have to pay me because you must work for something. And that’s way since 1989 to the date of my election, I have got paid by the company
Peter George: Can you say how much money did you get?
Zamma: I cannot recall but what ...
Peter George: Are we talking about perhaps tens of thousands of dollars?
Mary: He was with logging since logging came to Rendova and after he got what he wanted - after he's got the money and used it up, he looked for somewhere else to get money so he went into the Government to work there for money.
Another man who's won himself a new house is Changiu Phillips, a little bonus from his direct dealings with the loggers.
Changiu Phillips: They say I misused some money, that I mislead people but I just ask for proof but they didn't give me any proof.
For a paltry ten thousand Solomon dollars, Changiu's helped sign away his tribes' forests. Ten thousand dollars is about the price of five trees but now he's got his own small petrol business, Changiu thinks he, at least, has got a good deal.
Peter George: So if you're successful in this business though, you'll become what the big man of the village I suspect, is that right?
Phillips: That's if I'm honest with the business, how I deal with the business, if I'm honest, maybe I'll get something better.
Peter George: So how much money did they pay you?
Phillips: Sometimes they pay me $2000, just to sign one paper.
Peter George: Wow.
Phillips: Sometimes $500 depends on the importance of that document.
Peter George: Do you think this is a bit unfair for many of the people who get nothing?
Phillips: That's unfair, really, it's unfair.
Peter George: And will you do something about that?
Phillips: Well, ah, I don't think (so) because the money has gone and I don't know what to do.
Peter George: You've spent the money already?
Phillips: I've already spent everything. (Laughs)
Mary: I feel angry towards him but I feel angry at the Government who is doing this to us. They should see the safety of the citizens of the Solomon Islands before they even allow foreign companies to come into the Solomon Islands.
The betrayal in the far flung islands is magnified by allegations of rampant corruption in the capital, Honiara that undermines the whole democratic process.
Joses TUHANUKU Former Forestry Minister: Corruption is now in Solomon Islands in a big way and that involves ministers, politicians, officials and even traditional leaders. I think that corruption now has run to such a level that it is going to be a big job to try to eliminate this from our system.
As a former Forestry Minister, Joses Tuhanuku was himself the target of an overt attempt at bribery when an Asian logging company director tried to buy himself special treatment.
Joses: When he entered my office, he produced a white envelope and when I looked at the envelope, I knew it was something like some bundles of money and when I asked him what was in the envelope, he just wrote 10,000 dollars on a piece of paper ...
When Tuhanuku's Government stood up to the loggers, the companies were infuriated, and they held the Government to ransom by simply halting all logging exports.
Peter George: And what happened when they decided not to send out any more shipments?
Joses: Oh the Government was in a very tight financial position. As soon as the new Government came in they exported all the stockpile of logs and asked for duty exemption - which has been given to them too. So actually the logging companies can do whatever they want.
Peter George: Just about run the place?
Joses: That's right.
Today the man in charge of the Solomon Islands is a much more acceptable proposition for the loggers. He is, after all, one of them.
Prime Minister Solomon Mamaloni is the loggers' friend, a powerful man who owns his own logging company and presides over a compliant Cabinet with a deeply tarnished reputation.
Mamaloni came to power in 1994 when parliamentarians defected from the previous Government. Researchers Tarcisius and Duran have found files that show some of them may have done so after receiving payments from the logging companies.
Tarcisius: There was payments given to these ministers actually to leave the previous Government so that they could support ...
Peter George: So they crossed the floor, dropping the previous Prime Minister and taking up with Solomon Mamaloni.
According to their document, the cash flow into ministers' pockets continues unabated.
Tarcisius: It would be logical that somebody is giving money to a minister in request for tax exemption and the minister is giving 100 % tax exemption in response to this payment down to the minister's account.
Peter George: So do you see this as the smoking gun of evidence about what's happening?
Tarcisius: Yeah, exactly.
As for the Prime Minister, well he is possibly the major beneficiary of his own Government's policy.
Tarcisius: You have letters here written by the Prime Minister for example here, this is a letter from Somma written by Honourable Solomon Mamaloni as director of the company, letters asking for tax exemption, for 100%. See the company has go 100% tax exemption in the Solomons.
The documents show Mamaloni's company saves itself one and a half million Australian dollars a year on log exports worth four and a half million.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ABEFinance Minister: Somma Ltd. with other Solomon Islands owned companies, they all have 100% duty concession.
The Prime Minister was too busy to speak to us but his finance minister, despite a bout of malaria agreed to be interviewed.
Peter George: That seems to be a very odd conflict of interest when the finance minister is giving his Prime Minister 100% tax exemptions?
Christopher Columbus: No, I'm not giving to the Prime Minister, I'm giving it to the local companies.
Peter George: But it's his company.
Christopher Columbus: He's also on a local company so there are others, six or seven other local companies they are given the same status.
Peter George: Did he direct you to give him an exemption?
Christopher Columbus: No, no, no.
Peter George: But he asked you for it?
Christopher Columbus: Ah, yes, his manager asked.
Peter George: Well he asked you for it because I've seen the documents, it's his signature seeking the tax exemption, isn't it?
Christopher Columbus: Yeah but it's not, I gave it to him not because he's the Prime Minister, he's an indigenous Solomon Islander and he has a local company.
On Rendova Island, where the Kalena Timber Company is supposed to be a model of good logging practices, the evidence suggests a typical hack, slash and profit operation.
Environmentalists believe the forest will never recover and no one is replanting trees anyway.
Joses Tuhanuku: It's a resource that has been here for thousands for years handed down by our forefathers and I don't believe that Mamaloni and his Government ministers have more rights than those who live in the Solomon Islands before us and those who will be in the Solomon Islands in the future. I think it is immoral, that what they are doing is criminal.
Mary: The logging stopped everything. When logging comes, two of our main rivers are not good enough for drinking and for washing. And there is another river here in the village that we are still using but soon we won't use it any more. I don't know where we are going to get fresh water from.
Teacher: Once upon a time on the island of Belona an old woman went into the forest to look for our giant tree. She passed many trees but she passed them all by as she continued her chase. At last she found a suitable tree, it's bark was perfectly smooth and undamaged. She carefully cut the bark with a sharp knife ....
With the Government of the Solomons compromised and negligent and with it's people too isolated and innocent to comprehend the enormity of what's happening - there may soon be little left of the forest for them but myth and legend.
It involves politicians more interested in how much money they can make than they are in their own people. And it involves a scandal that reaches right up to the prime minister's office.
And the victims are of course the islanders themselves only some of them are at last beginning to realise that they have sold their birth rights for a pittance.
Tarcisius: You drive a taxi, you get to meet a lot of people. You meet all sorts of people, you meet prostitutes you meet ordinary people you meet Government officers, Government ministers and you get the kind of information you won't be able to get doing other things.
At night in the capital, Honiara, Tarcisius Tara drives a taxi. It's a front. It helps him dig into the corruption that logging has brought to the Solomons.
Tarcisius: Oh, I try and find out what Government ministers go to casinos, who are they hanging around with, how much money they spend at casinos ...
Tarcisius believes they come with wads of cash, paid by logging companies for timber concessions and tax breaks. When they leave, they often do so without even the price of a taxi fare.
Tarcisius: Well, I've got people there who keep record of how much money ministers spend, how much money they lost in casinos and it's quite substantial. They’ve got to be receiving money from elsewhere.
Tarcisius is not entirely alone in his pursuit. Duran Angiki also believes you have to fight the good fight and as a newspaperman, he first blew the whistle about Government ministers on the take.
Together, Tarcisius and Duran are compiling an extensive file of leaked Government and company documents that reveal how loggers routinely obtain favourable treatment by paying off ministers.
Duran Angiki, journalist: Then he told me those monies were paid out to ministers, and he named those ministers actually ...
Peter George: Totalling how much money in the end?
Duran: Totalling seven million dollars.
They also have documentation that at the least seem to reveal an extraordinary conflict of interest for the Prime Minister, Solomon Mamaloni.
Duran: Somma is the company owned by the Prime Minister.
Peter George: Solomon Mamaloni?
Duran: Yes, it's a logging company. The director of the company is the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands. The information here is the kind of information the public should know.
The betrayal starts in the pristine rainforests of 960 Solomon Islands ripe for the plucking.
Worldwide prices for hardwoods have soared, the Government desperately needs the money and tribal owners are easily conned into selling concessions for a song.
The loggers arrive with promises of wealth unimagined - and most islanders were delighted. An exception was Mary Bea.
Mary Bea, islander: People have become greedy, selfish and ah the love for money is greater than the love for each other.
Most of the islanders are ignorant and just a few educated people, greedy people invited the company to come in to Rendova Island and because they brainwashed the ignorant ones and the ignorant ones believed in them. But when the money is distributed it was unfairly distributed and that's where the ignorant people started to learn but then it's too late, the land has been logged and there is nothing for them left.
The loggers are supposed to pay 15 % of the value of each tree to the islanders and to build schools, churches, health clinics, roads and bridges.
In almost every respect the villagers have been deceived.
After four years and millions of dollars worth of exported logs, the clinic, for instance remains the ramshackle affair it always was, manned only by Reggie, the nursing aid.
Reggie, Nursing Aid: It makes me worry too much because of our children, because they won't have anything to benefit from in the future.
Mary's neighbours, once so enthusiastic, are as poor as ever and wonder what's happened to all the money.
Reggie: When you look at our village, you won't see any good developments - schools, churches and other community developments. We don't get any benefits at all. Just look at our houses.
Mary: Oh, the company give a lot of promises but these promises never happen and I don't know what time the promises will happen. And these are just false promises.
The freighter May Sunrise arrives to load the felled timber of Rendova Island. Last year according to documents viewed by Foreign Correspondent the Kalena Timber Company shipped about 7 and a half million dollars worth of logs from Rendova.
But the Malaysian company, like others loggers, is suspected of greatly under reporting the value of its logs to save on taxes. Yet about a million dollars should still have been paid to the local landowners. But the villagers can't tell us where the money has gone - and the company won't speak to us.
Timber Industry spokesman, Erich Kes, in Honiara tries to explain.
ERICH KES, Timber Industry: They are not generally speaking, just loggers companies, they are not very keen to come out into the open and say what it's all about. Landowners today have certainly ways and means to access law and access legal channels and many of the landowners to that, definitely, if the landowners don't do that, I would say this is their own decision. but it is certainly not overall a policy - and it is not happening all the time as you depicted - that landowners are taken in or basically cheated by the company.
But cheating there is at all levels. Timothy Zamma is a man grown rich after villagers chose him to represent them with the loggers. Ask him what's happened to the money and he finds plenty of spurious explanations.
Timothy Zamma, Village representative to Logging Company: They're trying to do something with the money they receive but during this time it's very very hard, a bit difficult to do.
Peter George: Why should it be difficult to spend the money?
Zamma: Because of very high inflation at this time.
Increasingly resentful and suspicious, the two thousand villagers, including Mary Bea have seen Zamma gain both power and wealth from his dealings with the Kalena company.
Peter George: Did you or your family receive a house or have you bought a house with the money that you have made from the company?
Zamma: Yes, I already build my house because when you get money you have to spend it wisely.
Peter George: What I'm wondering is why it is that someone like yourself can get enough money from the company to buy a house but these people here have nothing at all?
Zamma: It’s different - we get 15% royalty .. and if you deal with the company during negotiation, a consultant job, they have to pay me because you must work for something. And that’s way since 1989 to the date of my election, I have got paid by the company
Peter George: Can you say how much money did you get?
Zamma: I cannot recall but what ...
Peter George: Are we talking about perhaps tens of thousands of dollars?
Mary: He was with logging since logging came to Rendova and after he got what he wanted - after he's got the money and used it up, he looked for somewhere else to get money so he went into the Government to work there for money.
Another man who's won himself a new house is Changiu Phillips, a little bonus from his direct dealings with the loggers.
Changiu Phillips: They say I misused some money, that I mislead people but I just ask for proof but they didn't give me any proof.
For a paltry ten thousand Solomon dollars, Changiu's helped sign away his tribes' forests. Ten thousand dollars is about the price of five trees but now he's got his own small petrol business, Changiu thinks he, at least, has got a good deal.
Peter George: So if you're successful in this business though, you'll become what the big man of the village I suspect, is that right?
Phillips: That's if I'm honest with the business, how I deal with the business, if I'm honest, maybe I'll get something better.
Peter George: So how much money did they pay you?
Phillips: Sometimes they pay me $2000, just to sign one paper.
Peter George: Wow.
Phillips: Sometimes $500 depends on the importance of that document.
Peter George: Do you think this is a bit unfair for many of the people who get nothing?
Phillips: That's unfair, really, it's unfair.
Peter George: And will you do something about that?
Phillips: Well, ah, I don't think (so) because the money has gone and I don't know what to do.
Peter George: You've spent the money already?
Phillips: I've already spent everything. (Laughs)
Mary: I feel angry towards him but I feel angry at the Government who is doing this to us. They should see the safety of the citizens of the Solomon Islands before they even allow foreign companies to come into the Solomon Islands.
The betrayal in the far flung islands is magnified by allegations of rampant corruption in the capital, Honiara that undermines the whole democratic process.
Joses TUHANUKU Former Forestry Minister: Corruption is now in Solomon Islands in a big way and that involves ministers, politicians, officials and even traditional leaders. I think that corruption now has run to such a level that it is going to be a big job to try to eliminate this from our system.
As a former Forestry Minister, Joses Tuhanuku was himself the target of an overt attempt at bribery when an Asian logging company director tried to buy himself special treatment.
Joses: When he entered my office, he produced a white envelope and when I looked at the envelope, I knew it was something like some bundles of money and when I asked him what was in the envelope, he just wrote 10,000 dollars on a piece of paper ...
When Tuhanuku's Government stood up to the loggers, the companies were infuriated, and they held the Government to ransom by simply halting all logging exports.
Peter George: And what happened when they decided not to send out any more shipments?
Joses: Oh the Government was in a very tight financial position. As soon as the new Government came in they exported all the stockpile of logs and asked for duty exemption - which has been given to them too. So actually the logging companies can do whatever they want.
Peter George: Just about run the place?
Joses: That's right.
Today the man in charge of the Solomon Islands is a much more acceptable proposition for the loggers. He is, after all, one of them.
Prime Minister Solomon Mamaloni is the loggers' friend, a powerful man who owns his own logging company and presides over a compliant Cabinet with a deeply tarnished reputation.
Mamaloni came to power in 1994 when parliamentarians defected from the previous Government. Researchers Tarcisius and Duran have found files that show some of them may have done so after receiving payments from the logging companies.
Tarcisius: There was payments given to these ministers actually to leave the previous Government so that they could support ...
Peter George: So they crossed the floor, dropping the previous Prime Minister and taking up with Solomon Mamaloni.
According to their document, the cash flow into ministers' pockets continues unabated.
Tarcisius: It would be logical that somebody is giving money to a minister in request for tax exemption and the minister is giving 100 % tax exemption in response to this payment down to the minister's account.
Peter George: So do you see this as the smoking gun of evidence about what's happening?
Tarcisius: Yeah, exactly.
As for the Prime Minister, well he is possibly the major beneficiary of his own Government's policy.
Tarcisius: You have letters here written by the Prime Minister for example here, this is a letter from Somma written by Honourable Solomon Mamaloni as director of the company, letters asking for tax exemption, for 100%. See the company has go 100% tax exemption in the Solomons.
The documents show Mamaloni's company saves itself one and a half million Australian dollars a year on log exports worth four and a half million.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ABEFinance Minister: Somma Ltd. with other Solomon Islands owned companies, they all have 100% duty concession.
The Prime Minister was too busy to speak to us but his finance minister, despite a bout of malaria agreed to be interviewed.
Peter George: That seems to be a very odd conflict of interest when the finance minister is giving his Prime Minister 100% tax exemptions?
Christopher Columbus: No, I'm not giving to the Prime Minister, I'm giving it to the local companies.
Peter George: But it's his company.
Christopher Columbus: He's also on a local company so there are others, six or seven other local companies they are given the same status.
Peter George: Did he direct you to give him an exemption?
Christopher Columbus: No, no, no.
Peter George: But he asked you for it?
Christopher Columbus: Ah, yes, his manager asked.
Peter George: Well he asked you for it because I've seen the documents, it's his signature seeking the tax exemption, isn't it?
Christopher Columbus: Yeah but it's not, I gave it to him not because he's the Prime Minister, he's an indigenous Solomon Islander and he has a local company.
On Rendova Island, where the Kalena Timber Company is supposed to be a model of good logging practices, the evidence suggests a typical hack, slash and profit operation.
Environmentalists believe the forest will never recover and no one is replanting trees anyway.
Joses Tuhanuku: It's a resource that has been here for thousands for years handed down by our forefathers and I don't believe that Mamaloni and his Government ministers have more rights than those who live in the Solomon Islands before us and those who will be in the Solomon Islands in the future. I think it is immoral, that what they are doing is criminal.
Mary: The logging stopped everything. When logging comes, two of our main rivers are not good enough for drinking and for washing. And there is another river here in the village that we are still using but soon we won't use it any more. I don't know where we are going to get fresh water from.
Teacher: Once upon a time on the island of Belona an old woman went into the forest to look for our giant tree. She passed many trees but she passed them all by as she continued her chase. At last she found a suitable tree, it's bark was perfectly smooth and undamaged. She carefully cut the bark with a sharp knife ....
With the Government of the Solomons compromised and negligent and with it's people too isolated and innocent to comprehend the enormity of what's happening - there may soon be little left of the forest for them but myth and legend.