Andrei Ciurcanu - Although Romania boasts the most advanced traceability system in Europe (SUMAL), some companies have quickly found loopholes in the system – cloned photos.
- Authorities claim that this illegal method has become a national phenomenon and is frequently used by companies to transport and deliver timber of illegal origin.
- In practice, company employees do not photograph the timber trucks as required by law but instead upload other photos taken from electronic devices into the track and trace system (SUMAL).
- In the past year, large volumes of wood have been confiscated, and fines exceeding 2 million euros have been issued.
- RISE discovered that this illegal mechanism was even used by subsidiaries of the Kronospan group in Romania.
- We analyzed over 21,000 transports and identified hundreds of non-compliant photos uploaded to SUMAL for wood delivered to Sebeș, as well as hundreds more transports for which the cargo was not photographed.
- The Ministry of Environment announced that using clone photos will be treated as falsification in declarations, and those who practice this method risk imprisonment.
May 5th, 2023, Bistrița County. A truck loaded with sawdust is stopped during a routine police check while heading to the Kronospan-owned factory in Sebeș, Alba.
The Austrian corporation, one of the largest in the world, owns three wood processing factories in Romania located in Sebeș, Brașov, and Fălticeni.
The police crew stops the truck and verifies the documents. For the past year, authorities have been facing a new issue: clone transports.
This is an illicit method to circumvent SUMAL 2.0 — the Timber Material Tracking System — managed by the Ministry of Environment, which former minister Tanczos Barna claimed to be one of the most advanced in Europe.
The truck belongs to Silva Logistic, an LLC also controlled by Kronospan. The loaded wood comes from a major company in Bistrița, Silvania Internațional Prod, which ranks among the top 10 wood processing companies in the country. All companies involved in this transport share at least one thing in common: they were fined by the Competition Council in 2021 for anti-competitive practices.
All timber transports must obtain a unique code, and the driver is required to enter transport details into the system, including photos of the loaded truck. This allows the Police and Forest Guard to quickly verify the legality of the transport and the origin of the loaded wood.
However, some companies have quite easily identified weaknesses in the system and managed to circumvent it. Authorities have discovered that some users use SUMAL to launder illegally cut wood that lacks provenance documents. One of the methods used is entering false data into SUMAL and uploading clone photos, thus creating the appearance of legality for timber transports.
In April 2022, legislation was amended so that all transports using clone photos are declared illegal. The use of clone photos has become a nationwide phenomenon and prompted the Ministry of Environment to request further legislative changes. At a conference in August last year, Environment Minister Mircea Fechet announced that using clone photos will be treated as falsification in declarations, and those who use this method risk imprisonment.
After checking the documents, police officers discovered that a non-compliant photo had been uploaded to SUMAL. Instead of photographing the cargo inside the container, the user had photographed the screen of a mobile phone. The person who took the photo was the truck driver, an employee of Silva Logistic SRL, a transport company owned by Kronospan through a Cyprus-based company.
The case of the truck stopped by the police marked the beginning of a journalistic investigation that spanned several months. RISE reporters analyzed the transports carried out by Silva Logistic from the moment the use of non-compliant (clone) photos was declared illegal up to the present. We analyzed more than 7,000 transports and over 21,000 photos, discovering that Silva Logistic used clone photos for hundreds of transports.
For at least another two hundred transports, the company did not upload any photos, even though the law requires that the transported products be visible in the photos.
240 clones, the same carrier
So, how was it possible for a company owned by Kronospan to use this illegal method to transport wood, and for the Austrian giant to receive it without any problem?
“It was photo after photo. The driver was in a hurry because he loaded from two places. One container from one location and the other from another, and the photo was not compliant. That was the whole thing,” tried to explain Emil Iugan, manager of Silvania International, the company from which the wood originated when stopped by police.
Iugan added that his company was not involved in this case and that his business is clean:
“We don’t have multiple transports. Multiple transports are what bring down the real economy, carried out by the underground economy that is thriving in the country.”
A more detailed analysis of the data uploaded to SUMAL, however, shows a different reality than the one described by the businessman. We discovered that the truck stopped by the police in May is not an isolated case. Nearly 30 transports with non-compliant photos made by Silva Logistic involved wood from factories controlled by the Iugan family, operated by Silvania Internațional and Silvania Sortilemn.
Some of these transports reached the Kronospan factory in Sebeș, and the most recent permits with non-compliant photos were registered at the beginning of November 2023.
Contacted by phone, businessman Emil Iugan stated that it is not the responsibility of his company to check Silva Logistic’s trucks.
“We are not criminals. It’s not my obligation to take photos of their trucks. Nowhere in the law does it say I have to do that. I loaded it, it left, I got the confirmation. I don’t see where the problem is!” reacted Emil Iugan.
Silvania Internațional is just one of 66 companies that have delivered wood transported by Silva Logistic using non-compliant photos.
From April 2022 to November 2023, Silva Logistic, owned by Kronospan, carried out over 240 transports using non-compliant photos. This involved 3,000 cubic meters of wood and wood products, half of which ended up at Kronospan’s factory in Sebeș. Practically, through transports with non-compliant photos, Silva Logistic moved half of the timber value confiscated by the police nationwide over one year—from April 2022 to May 2023 – the month when the police stopped Silva Logistic’s timber truck.
Kronospan also received transports with non-compliant photos from other sources. We identified at least one other important Kronospan partner who, for transports delivered to the Sebeș factory, used photos showing elements also discovered by the National Forest Guard in internal investigations regarding the use of non-compliant photos nationwide. The company – DML Invest SRL – is ranked among the top 10 companies supplying wood to the Sebeș factory.
We requested a statement from the company regarding the non-compliant photos used for timber transports. Contacted by phone, the company’s administrator said they would provide an explanation but we have not received a reply till the publication of this article.
MAP OF TRANSPORTS WITH CLONE PHOTOS
For optimal performance of all features, we recommend using the map on a desktop.
“IT IS TRULY SHOCKING”
Large corporations have their own procedures for verifying legality in dealings with business partners. That’s why we asked experts about the cases we uncovered.
“It is truly shocking to me to learn that such a large company, supplying so much wood daily, does not at least use this publicly available tool, SUMAL, to verify the purchases it makes,” reacted David Gehl, Traceability and Technology Manager at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an NGO that investigates environmental crimes worldwide. EIA knows how illegal timber theft and transport operate on Romania’s roads.
“This is not the first time Kronospan has been at the center of stories about illegal timber. EIA has mentioned the company’s name on many other occasions and reports. So I am genuinely surprised that such a company, which has been under investigators’ scrutiny in the past, does not use publicly available tools for clean transactions,” Gehl added.
In 2015, EIA investigators also discovered how another large Austrian wood processor, Holzindustrie Schweighofer, negotiated illegally cut timber.
The Austrian group Holzindustrie Schweighofer, renamed HS Timber, also appears on the map of clone transports. We found five different transports for which the same photo was used. Four clones originated from the factory in Sebeș, then owned by Schweighofer, and the fifth from a Kronospan factory. All transports then ended up at Kronospan’s Sebeș unit.
Asked to comment on the situation, the head of the compliance department at HS Timber replied that the company investigated the case and found no issues affecting the company.
We contacted all companies that delivered timber using Silva Logistic trucks and where we found non-compliant photos. At least 10 of them replied, insisting that they comply with legislation and that it is not their responsibility to take photos or upload them into the SUMAL system.
“Large processing companies in the timber market are the actors who define what happens in the forest through control over their own supply chain. If they care about sustainability, and most promise this to beneficiaries, then they must develop internal traceability methods, effectively doubling SUMAL where it fails,” explained Ciprian Gălușcă, forest campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Romania. Gălușcă added that large traders should also be responsible and verify the transports uploaded into SUMAL.
HOW SUMAL WORKS. In Romania, every timber transport is tracked via GPS and must be uploaded into SUMAL with all details: the name of the company transporting the wood, the company that harvested/processed it, the truck’s license plate number, the volume of wood loaded, the species, and photos of the truck and the cargo. Photos are required to verify the wood between the loading point and the destination—specifically, to ensure that no wood without provenance has been added beyond the legal volume.
With all these details uploaded into the traceability system, the operator receives a unique code that is valid for the period necessary for the transport to reach its destination from the loading point.
By receiving this code, the transport is considered legal until proven otherwise. And here is where things get complicated. To identify clone photos, the traceability system needs continuous updates, but currently, this is done manually by a group of employees who analyze each photo uploaded into the system.
And this is exactly what the RISE reporters did.
Ciprian Gălușcă from Greenpeace explained that if the system doesn’t automatically detect clones, it’s impossible to identify illegalities with an understaffed team, given that over 12,000 transports are registered daily:
“Cloning photos uploaded into SUMAL is one of the loopholes through which economic agents artificially generate provenance documents for illegally cut wood or wood whose origin cannot be justified. We highlighted this method two years ago when we analyzed the theoretical risks of the system.”
In 2015, the Supreme Council of National Defense (CSAT) declared illegal logging a potential risk to national security. Known as the “lungs of Europe,” Romania hosts the largest primary forests in the EU, which are under pressure from logging due to high demand in the timber market.
Because of illegal logging and destruction of forests included in Natura 2000 sites, Romania faces the risk of an infringement procedure by the EU, which means the country could pay fines daily until authorities fix the problem.
SUMAL was partly created exactly for this purpose — to combat illegal logging through national-level analysis of timber traceability. Without automated analysis and processing of the data entered into the system, the effort is useless, says a Greenpeace expert, who adds that the phenomenon has spread nationwide.
The use of clone photos across the entire country has also been confirmed by the Romanian General Police Inspectorate (IGPR). In an official response, IGPR explained that the illegal method is frequently used by companies “to ship and transport timber of illegal origin, especially by carrying out multiple transports based on the same transport permit or to carry out transports from a different location/different cargo than declared in the SUMAL 2.0 information system.”
This nationwide phenomenon is reflected in the volume of fines and confiscated wood. Between April 2022 and December 2023, the Romanian Police and the Forest Guard discovered over 2,400 clone transports, issued nearly 2 million euros in fines, and confiscated wood worth 1.6 million euros.
The Ministry of Environment has not yet implemented filters to prevent the use of clones in SUMAL or to identify those already uploaded in the system. At a press conference in early August 2023, Environment Minister Mircea Fechet announced that the control authority is facing a number of economic agents using unorthodox methods for transports and resorting to falsified photos:
“There is a certain degree of inventiveness, and we will say through the new forestry code that uploading such falsified data into the electronic system will be assimilated to the crime of falsifying statements on the one hand and will carry a risk of imprisonment of up to five years.”
Threats of imprisonment and merely identifying non-compliant photos are not enough to deter illegal transports.
“We see that there are control bodies that take significant risks to investigate cases of illegal logging, investigations that require a lot of time and for which investigators put in considerable effort. And yet, it all ends with files being closed or hidden away in some drawers.”
– David Gehl, expert EIA
DELAYED INVESTIGATIONS
The latest report from the Judicial Inspection on the investigation of forestry crimes reveals significant delays in criminal investigations.
Even the legislation that should sanction those who use clone photos is ineffective. The current law, as written, holds the commercial agent who sells the wood responsible—not those who transport it, take the photos, and then upload them into SUMAL. This loophole in the law has limited investigations by police officers and inspectors from the Forest Guards, sources among investigators explained.
The Ministry of Environment was informed about this legal issue as early as February 2022. A report from the Forest Guard sent to the minister warned that, due to the current law, clones can only be investigated and sanctioned in cases where the same company both transports and sells the wood. In an official response, the Ministry of Environment confirmed these conflicting legal situations and explained that changes will be made in the near future.
For control authorities, not only is catching those transporting illegal timber difficult, but sanctioning them—even when caught in the act—is also challenging. According to information obtained from the Forest Guards and Romanian Police, prosecutors investigating illegalities usually return confiscated trucks, even though the economic agents are caught with non-compliant photos and quantities of wood exceeding the volumes declared in SUMAL.
One such case occurred in Mureș County. The National Forest Guard and Police discovered that a company was using non-compliant photos for timber transports. This prompted a more thorough on-site inspection.
Thus, during a routine check, investigators stopped one of the company’s trucks loaded with logs and found that the transport was not even declared in SUMAL.
According to the law, transporting timber without documents in volumes exceeding 10 cubic meters is a crime. Therefore, the Police and Forest Guard confiscated the truck and filed criminal complaints, and the case was registered at the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Reghin Court. Just one month after the truck was stopped in traffic, the case prosecutor decided to return the confiscated truck.
In a reply to RISE, the leadership of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Reghin Court confirmed the investigations in the criminal case and explained that “the measures taken represent a stage in the criminal process according to the Criminal Procedure Code and do not in any way overturn the principle of presumption of innocence.”
As a result, the truck is still currently used for transporting timber.
THE DRIVERS FROM PHONE SCREENS
The first cases of clone photos were discovered in the spring of 2022, and since then the phenomenon has spread nationwide. Errors in the photos were the elements that revealed the fraud. Inspectors from the Forest Guards discovered reflections of the sun or other light sources, drivers’ fingers, and sometimes even the drivers themselves reflected in the screens of the phones they had photographed. Additionally, the images had an unnatural violet-blue tint or the edges of the phones were visible. RISE reporters identified these elements in all 240 clones uploaded into SUMAL, created by Silva Logistic.
Photos were uploaded in which the fingers of people holding the phone used to take the picture are visible.
Sometimes the edges of the phone are visible, including the options from the camera app menu of the photographed device.
In other photos, light sources are visible—flashes, the sun, or, if the photos were taken indoors, reflections of light bulbs.
In other cases, blurry images, pixels, and the violet-blue color reveal the non-compliant files.
Because they realized they could be caught due to reflections, techniques to hide the clones have changed over time, says a specialist from the National Forest Guard:
“Some users now use printed pages on A4 sheets and camera filters so that the clones look as real as possible and are quite difficult for us to identify. But after some work, we manage to find some of them.”
A possible clone case involving an A4 sheet was identified in a transport carried out by Silva Logistic. The wood came from the Lunca Ilvei factory operated by Silvania Internațional. We showed the photo to the National Forest Guard specialist who, after a brief analysis, confirmed that all elements in the photo match cases documented by the National Forest Guard.
“A much larger team is needed; we do not have enough personnel to identify all non-compliant photos nationwide,” the specialist added.
We called on an independent expert to analyze the 240 non-compliant photos uploaded into the SUMAL system for transports performed by Silva Logistic.
Cătălin Grigoraș, associate professor at the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado and a forensic expert in audio-video, confirmed RISE’s findings. He found inconsistencies in most of the photos uploaded into SUMAL.
Grigoraș discovered that some had the same or similar content, there were light reflections, and in many cases, either the screen matrix, the menu of the photographed electronic device, or the edges of the device were visible. For 60 photos, the expert stated that the images “do not contain artifacts that are strong or clear enough” like the rest analyzed, but that this does not necessarily mean they contain no artifacts at all.
WHEN THE WOOD CROSSES THE BORDER
Kronospan is one of the world’s largest producers of wood-based panels, used in everything from furniture and interior design to timber-framed houses, building facades, and flooring.
In Romania, the company has three factories and sells its wood products throughout Europe.
With cloned transports mixed into the delivery flow, all of Kronospan’s partners risk purchasing products that contain illegally sourced wood, Thomas Waitz, a Member of the European Parliament, explained to us:
“The company supplies products to some of the world’s largest furniture manufacturers, namely Ikea, XXX Lutz, and so on. Any furniture manufacturer buying Kronospan products cannot rule out that they are trading wood that is at least partially illegally cut or falsely declared. There is a high risk. There is an obvious risk.”
The MEP has traveled to Romania several times and has seen how forests are managed here. In 2018, Waitz tried unsuccessfully to visit Kronospan’s factory in Sebeș to meet with management and discuss allegations regarding the processing of illegal wood. No one from the factory’s management received him.
“Kronospan is the only company of this size that I know of which does not communicate with anyone. This company has managed to operate without being under the scrutiny of authorities, but this is no longer possible.
More and more actors, institutions, and law enforcement are receiving increasing amounts of evidence regarding their actions.”
– Thomas Waitz, member of the European Parliament
In Romania, Kronospan was fined 9.4 million euros in 2021 by the Competition Council for anti-competitive practices. Alongside Kronospan, the company HS Timber, formerly Holzindustrie Schweighofer, and other companies were also fined.
The Competition Council argued that market rules were violated by major players in order to eliminate competition and purchase cheaper wood, to the detriment of the state.
Practically, the Romanian state loses multiple times. How? The non-transparent agreements between market players on pricing result in less money reaching public budgets, and problematic auctions concern wood from state forests.
In the same investigation, the transport company Silva Logistic was also sanctioned with a fine of over 120,000 euros.
Last year, Silva Logistic was fined again. Police discovered that the company carried out dozens of transports without uploading photos in SUMAL where the wood cargo could be clearly distinguished or focused. RISE reporters found that hundreds of transports were uploaded into SUMAL without any photo of the wood cargo at all.
The Forestry Guard also fined the company last year. During routine inspections, field inspectors identified a truck transporting sawdust without the GPS system being continuously active. Silva Logistic challenged the fine from the Forestry Guard in court, and the case is still ongoing.
Officially, in public statements, Kronospan claims to have a risk matrix and very strict selection procedures among its suppliers. Moreover, Oana Bodea, General Director of Kronospan Trading, praised Romania’s system during a furniture industry conference in the fall of 2022:
“We are the first to support sustainability. SUMAL 2 is a program that should be promoted at the European level. Europe is now talking about total traceability of wood. I believe Romania is the only country that has implemented a total traceability system. We should go to the European Commission and ask them to implement this traceability and SUMAL in other countries that don’t have such traceability.”
The management of Kronospan Romania declined to give an interview regarding the issue of non-compliant photos used in Silva Logistic’s transports. However, the company acknowledged in an official response that there are problems with how transport drivers take photos—“due to negligence or ignorance.”
Kronospan officials emphasized that they purchase only legal wood, which is thoroughly verified, and that these internal control procedures apply to both suppliers and received transports.
“Our most important objective at Silva and Kronospan is to fully comply with the law and to conduct as many verifications as possible to ensure that the wood we purchase is legally sourced,” explained Oana Bodea, CEO of Kronospan Romania.
As proof of legality in the case of the most recent non-compliant photo used for a transport in November 2023, the Kronospan official presented a photo of the truck taken by Kronospan’s CCTV system installed at the entrance of the Sebeș factory.
However, in the CCTV system, the truck’s color appears white, while the cloned photo uploaded to the SUMAL system for the same transport shows a blue truck.
THE SOLUTION: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial intelligence could be the solution to processing the massive volume of data. Every day, over 12,000 transports are registered in SUMAL, with four photos uploaded for each transport. That means tens of thousands of photos daily—an amount impossible for a handful of people to process.
At the end of September last year, a team from the Ministry of Environment met with specialists from Google Romania. The two parties discussed the clone photo problem and possible solutions to prevent these photos from being uploaded to the system.
Just one month after the meeting with Google experts, the Ministry of Environment announced an 8.9 million euro tender. With this funding, authorities plan to develop a system with 350 video observation points that will use license plate recognition technology and advanced analysis cameras to capture information about every truck loaded with wood. The data will then be compared with SUMAL records to verify their accuracy.
According to EU regulations, all operators placing wood-based products on the European Union market must ensure their traceability to minimize the risk of trading illegal wood or products containing illegally harvested wood.
Starting December 2024, the rules regarding traceability will become even stricter, explained David Gehl, an investigator with EIA.
“This will be a huge change for companies like Kronospan, which must act quickly to change how they source from Romania and other countries in order to comply with the new European law. If non-compliant wood is mixed into the supply chain, then everything that could be contaminated is illegal to place on the European market.”
Author: Andrei Ciurcanu
Fact-Checking: Roxana Jipa
Romana Puiuleț 
Rise Project 
