Brazil bridles at Eliasch bid to save Amazon

Johan Eliasch is a multi- millionaire polymath from Sweden. Chairman of the Head sports company, he has skied in international competitions and produced a TV dramatisation of Lady Chatterley's Lover. He is on the board of the Centre for Social Justice and gives a lot of money to charity. Once deputy treasurer of the Conservative Party, Eliasch now works as Gordon Brown's advisor on energy and deforestation.

He has a realistic, businessman's philosophy about environmental issues. The "only way to save the rainforest is you have to make it more valuable standing than logged," he said.

So Eliasch bought up a previously dubious lumber company called Gethal and 400,000 acres of the Amazon in order to stop its destruction, and founded an NGO, Cool Earth, which encourages members of the public to spend £35 on half an acre of rainforest in Brazil or Peru. So far, its website shows that 37,106 acres have been protected. Evidently, Eliasch is one of the good guys. But last week the news broke that Gethal was to be fined £139m for illegally chopping down 230,000 trees and lacking proper land certificates.

Gethal do not intend to pay the fine - which they say relates to a time before Eliasch bought the company - and are preparing for a battle in the courts. "Those allegations are false, fabricated and unsubstantiated…The real issue is politically motivated”, a source close to Eliasch suggested.

The political motivation is simple: Brazilians are increasingly anxious about foreigners buying up swathes of their country. The issue was reignited when a leading Rio de Janeiro daily, O Globo, referred to a speech Eliasch had made in 2006. Talking about the $75bn paid out by insurers after hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, Eliasch said it might be cheaper to save the rainforest "for $25bn", thereby preventing deforestation and making hurricanes less frequent. O Globo reported this as Eliasch suggesting that foreigners could buy the whole rainforest for $50bn.

President Lula, feeling obliged to condemn what he saw as neo-colonialism, said: "The world needs to understand that the Amazon has an owner, and that is the Brazilian people."

Foreign ownership in the Amazon is a delicate issue because of the recent geopolitical blame game. Brazil produces a lot of the biofuel ethanol, and Lula is angry that rich nations have apportioned much of the blame for recent global food shortages on biofuels.

But there are also local reasons for Eliasch's problems. Three weeks ago, the environment minister Marina Silva resigned, frustrated with government inaction on green issues. Her replacement, Carlos Minc, is very keen to make an impression in his new job.

Minc earned his spurs - and a spell in prison - as a student leader during the military dictatorship, and has since founded the Brazilian Green Party and developed something of a personality cult. Sporting his trademark waistcoat and a curious hairstyle, he is a regular cover star of a magazine immodestly titled Minc. His intentions - a zero deforestation plan and an Amazon-wide police force – are ambitious.

Johan Eliasch, it seems, is paying the price. Or possibly not. In Minc's previous incarnation - in charge of environmental affairs for the state of Rio de Janeiro - his authority managed to collect a mere one per cent of environmental fines levied. ·