JAKARTA: Indonesian plantation companies fined for burning huge areas of land since 2009 have failed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties meant to hold them accountable for actions that took a devastating environmental and human toll.
The palm oil and pulp wood companies involved in fires owe over US$220mil (RM895.5mil) in fines and the figure for unpaid penalties for environmental destruction swells to US$1.3bil (RM5.3bil) when an illegal logging case from 2013 is included, according to separate summaries of the cases compiled by Greenpeace and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.