Lumber Liquidators was fined under the Lacey Act because they imported illegal wood and submitted false declaration. The Virgina-based company has to pay $13.2 million, as decided under the Lacey Act, that is a conservation law that makes it a crime to import plants and animals taken in violation of state and foreign law, as EIA reports stated.
The company now has to implement a strict environmental compliance plan, as it was put under a 5-year probation. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service discovered after two years of investigation, that the flooring retailer smuggled illegal wood from the forests of the Russian Far East. Lumber Liquidators were found guilty in October 2015 and fined today for one criminal felony of entry of goods by means of false statements and four misdemeanor counts of violating the Lacey Act.
The forests of the Russian Far East are the habitat of the last Siberian tigers in the world.
The company imported the stolen wood to China and they also sourced illegal timber from Bruma.
EIA investigators disguised in timber buyers as to expose the illegal timber and published the whole story in a 2013 report, titled “Liquidating the Forests”. They tracked down the wood through China to a company that confessed the illegal logging.
Alexander von Bismarck, EIA Executive Director, said that “this historic criminal sentence against a major U.S. company in relation to the Lacey Act is setting an important precedent: Illegal wood is no longer tolerated in the United States. U.S. consumers need to be protected from unknowingly supporting organized crime and the destruction of the world’s last virgin forests.”
Now, Lumber Liquidators have to pay $7.8 million in criminal fines, $1.23 million Community Service payments, $969,175 in forfeited proceeds, and more than $3.15 million in cash through a related civil forfeiture, according to EIA reports. Besides the fines, the flooring retailer has to put in place the mandatory environmental compliance plan, which implies to transform its sourcing practices and to have all their wood imports verified.
[gravityform id="1" title="false" description="true"]
