Forestry Sustainability Verification
A client with forestry-sector exposure needed to assess whether an export ban framed as environmental policy would hold. The assessment established the commercial interests and authority sustaining the measure. The client repositioned according to those interests rather than the directive's stated rationale.
A presidential directive, framed as a measure against deforestation and a push for domestic processing, banned unprocessed timber exports. A client with exposure to the sector needed to know whether the ban would hold. Ministry officers had recommended a narrow measure; what came from the executive was a blanket ban they had not proposed and did not support.
It enriched a small group of processors with access to the president, some of them backed by senior military figures. They stood to corner raw-material supply once rivals were forced out and growers were left with timber they could not sell. Treated poles and kiln-dried timber, finished by the ministry's own standards, were reclassified as raw to starve a captive domestic market. The agencies meant to police the ban answered, through the security chain, to the interests it served. The revenue and trade arms resisted a measure that gutted their tax base. The ban was not environmental policy but market capture. And because the interests it served sat above the technical ministries, it would hold far longer than its stated rationale implied.
The client repositioned on that basis, rather than on the directive's face.
The mandates below are drawn from hundreds of engagements over fifteen years, including work predating Periplus. Specific parties, jurisdictions and instructing firms are protected by confidentiality.