Danish company stops buying Liberian lumber

The chief executive officer (CEO) of a Danish company announced on Tuesday in an interview with Danish national radio that it would stop buying timber from Liberian companies. Jorgen Rasmussen, CEO of the DLH Group, made the announcement one day after three NGOs - Greenpeace, Global Witness and Nepenthes - called upon him to stop dealing with Liberian logging companies implicated by the United Nations in arms trafficking. Rasmussen said DLH would stop buying timber from Liberian companies until the United Nations or the European Union had certified that the situation had been normalised, according to a transcript of his interview with Danish radio. The transcript was provided by a member of Nepenthes, a Danish NGO, and posted on the Friends of Liberia web site. “We take the letter very seriously,” Rasmussen said. “We cannot accept that we trade with companies that violate human rights or practice destructive logging. We have therefore, on the basis of that, decided to stop trading with those companies and to do our trade in other places instead.”