Notorious Palm Oil Giant Korindo Wins International Bully of The Year Award

Brussels, Belgium – A jury of distinguished European parliamentarians and expert NGOs – empaneled by the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) – have awarded the Korindo Group the dubious title of International Bully of the Year. The notorious Korean-Indonesian palm oil, logging and wind tower conglomerate has been using legal tactics to intimidate and silence its critics for exposing it’s appalling track record on large-scale rainforest destruction and violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples in Papua and North Maluku, Indonesia. Rather than acknowledge and remedy these egregious practices, Korindo has responded with a range of legal threats to journalists, an international forestry certification body (the Forest Stewardship Council), and NGOs in Indonesia and around the world.

Since early 2020, one of Mighty Earth’s NGO partners, Center for International Policy, and its German NGO ally, Rainforest Rescue (Retten den Regenwald), have had to contend with an onerous and ill-conceived defamation suit (a so-called Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or “SLAPP”) filed against them by a Korindo supplier in Germany.

Deborah Lapidus, Vice President at Mighty Earth issued the following statement:

“The world is now recognizing what we have exposed for years—Korindo’s pattern of bullying its way into getting what it wants, from its unsavory acquisition of Indigenous lands to its burying investigative reports of its wrongdoing under the rug—and now through legal action aimed at silencing its critics.  Mighty Earth hopes that this award is a further reminder to Korindo that its strategy of clearing rainforests and running roughshod over Indigenous communities, then threatening those who expose these harms, is not only bad for people and bad for the climate – it is bad for business, as it further drags its reputation into the mud.

Korindo should drop its immoral lawsuit and focus its efforts and resources on preventing deforestation, compensating for rainforests and ecosystems it has destroyed, and providing restitution to the Indigenous people and communities that it has harmed.

Mighty Earth stands in solidarity with CASE in calling for the European Union to adopt legislation to protect NGOs and people across the EU against SLAPPs so that it’s not so easy for deep-pocketed companies like Korindo to bully NGOs, journalists, and activists into silence.”