Carbon credit investor ‘burns’

EBC Guernsey Limited and Kariba REDD part-owner Steve Wentzel is in a pickle over his carbon credits investments, which might even land him in jail.

The gold and safari wheeler dealer first got involved in the lucrative environmental business after a debtor gave him a northern Zimbabwe piece of land and subsequently linked up with South Pole (SP) in 2010.

As it became the latter’s biggest cash cow — accounting for 10 percent of revenue — it earned investments from TotalEnergies, Volkswagen, Ernst & Young, Gucci and Greenchoice — and to an extent that the French energy giant reported that its fossil gas was “carbon neutral” thanks to the Kariba project.

However, it was reported in 20023 that Wentzel’s project had massively inflated the Zimbabwean deforestation rate outside its support and, thus, it had sold “considerably more than its emissions project”.

In a recent article, The New Yorker said Kariba REDD had sold almost US$100 million worth of fake carbon credits and that people living in the affected areas would be getting money: “Don’t cut the trees down, that’s… what they have to do. We don’t ask the birds to fly backwards. It is just a net positive for them,” Wentzel said.

“You have to use certain conduits. Ultimately, my goal is to make sure that… everyone gets the benefit. How it gets there? I’d rather you didn’t ask those questions,” the Carbon Green Investments (CGI) owner said. After SP had carried a due diligence on the company, the newspaper said: “Dirk Muench pulled the records… to Kariba and saw that all the money – some US40 million — had been wired to… Guernsey. He told Wentzel that he needed evidence of where the funds… had gone.

But… Wentzel remained evasive. SP had hardly any idea what had happened to tens of millions… its clients had spent supposedly offsetting their carbon emissions”. The actual amount of money that SP transferred to CGI is not clear, although Wentzel has confirmed a €40 million figure. But after being confronted that it had made bigger commitments in Kariba than it disclosed to the outside world, it changed its tune, now claiming that €57 million was sent.

According to project documents, CGI was entitled to 30 percent, the rest of the money going into rural district councils and only a trickle used for school huts, anti-poaching and some farming activities.

Much later, Wentzel sent a spreadsheet only accounting for some €6 million and of which Muench rejected as having “no backing” at all – and even sent an email to SP chief executive Renat Heuberger, with the subject “red flag”. “…after a long investigation, he conclude(d) that most of the funds… had gone astray,” it said, but the investigator was booted out in December 2022 and just three days after the firm had conducted a crisis meeting about Kariba.

Apart from admitting to the New Yorker writers that “there was no paper trail”, Wentzel blames restrictive measures, political and economic instability in Zimbabwe for the missing millions, and therefore, he had to devise “untraceable ways of moving the cash.

Do you know how much compliance I had to go through to just have one transaction? It was illegal, but it got overlooked,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re going to report… because l (will) probably go to jail,” Wentzel recently said.